BODY  AND  WILL 


BODY  AN^D  WILL 


AN  ESSAY  CONCERNING  WILL 


METAPHYSICAL,  PHYSIOLOGICAL,  AND    PATHOLOGICAL 

ASPECTS 


BY 

HENRY    MAUDSLEY,    M.  D. 


ATJTHOE   OP 


"  BODY   AND   MIND,"     "  PHTSIOLOOY   OF   THE   MIND,"     "  PATHOLOGY    OF  THE  MIND," 
"  RESPONSIBILITY   IN  MENTAL   DISEASE  " 


NEW   YORK 
D.     APPLETON     AND    COMPANY 

1,  3,  AND  5  BOND  STREET 
1884 


Br 

6(1 

im 


PEEFACE. 


This  essay  has  had  its  beginnings  in  lectures  and  addresses 
which  I  have  given  on  different  occasions  during  the  last 
ten  years ;  the  themes  of  which  were  Conscience  and  Organi- 
sation, the  Physical  Basis  of  Will,  Lessons  of  Materialism, 
and  the  like.  The  design,  entertained  vaguely  for  some  time, 
of  collecting  them  into  a  book  was  abandoned,  because  it  was 
evident  that  the  treatment  of  the  subject  in  that  loose  way 
would  not  be  sufficiently  concise  and  methodical,  or  indeed 
adequate.  Thereupon  this  essay  on  Will  in  its  metaphysical, 
physiological,  and  pathological  relations  was  undertaken,  in 
order  to  have  unity  of  subject  and  to  treat  it  systematically 
and  with  more  pretence  to  completeness.  The  freedom  of 
a  spiritual  will  being  the  stronghold  of  a  metaphysical 
psychology,  there  can  be  no  accusation  of  evading  difficul- 
ties when  that  is  selected  as  test-subject  of  the  value  of 
the  doctrines  arrived  at  by  the  positive  method  of  observation 
and  induction.  If  the  method  fails  there,  its  fundamental 
incompetence  must  be  frankly  admitted. 

I  am  not  ignorant  that  those  who  are  adepts  in  the  schools 
of  high  mental  philosophy  may  think  the  essay  to  be  a  weak 
intrusion  into  their  high  domains ;  for  I  must  confess  to  being 
unable  to  use  their  language  with  a  satisfactory  sense  of 
having  clear  and  definite  ideas  beneath  its  terms,  to  having 
no  proper  faith  in  their  methods,  and  to  having  failed  to 
gather  from  their  works  fruits  of  any  practical  use.     From 


VI  PEEFACE. 

their  standpoint  they  may  be  satisfied  to  dismiss  it  as  of  no 
philosophical  concern  to  them.  Its  justification  from  my 
standpoint  is,  that  I  have  been  engaged  all  my  life  in  dealing 
with  mind  in  its  concrete  human  embodiments,  and  that  in 
order  to  find  out  why  individuals  feel,  think,  and  do  as  they 
do,  how  they  may  be  actuated  to  feel,  think,  and  do  differently, 
and  in  what  way  best  to  deal  with  them  so  as  to  do  one's 
duty  to  oneself  and  to  them,  I  have  had  no  choice  but  to 
leave  the  barren  heights  of  speculation  for  the  plains  on 
which  men  live  and  move  and  have  their  being.  It  is  not 
enough  to  think  and  talk  about  abstract  minds  and  their 
qualities  when  you  have  to  do  with  concrete  minds  that 
must  be  observed,  studied,  and  managed. 

The  essay  will  not  be  in  vain  if  it  serve  to  bring  home 
to  mental  philosophers  the  necessity  of  taking  serious  account 
of  a  class  of  facts  and  thoughts  which,  though  they  a,re  not 
philosophy,  may  claim  not  to  be  ignored  by  philosophy. 
After  all,  it  wUl  not  be  labour  lost,  since  they  may  well  spare 
a  little  time  from  their  work  of  saying  over  and  over  again, 
in  different  and  not  always  clearer  language,  what  was 
said  more  than  two  thousand  years  ago,  and  of  diligently 
endeavouring  to  do  now  by  the  same  method  what  men  of 
not  less  philosophical  aptitudes  and  capacities  failed  to  do 
then. 


CONTENTS. 


PART   I. 
WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

SECTTOX  PAGK 

I.    The  Theoey  of  Freewill  and  its  Difficulties  .        .        .        i 


n.    "What  Coksciousness  tells  us  concerning  Will 
ni.    Concerning  the  Authority  of  Consciousness 
IV.    The  Positive  Assurance  of  Consciousness 

v.    The  Physical  Basis  op  Conscious  Identity  . 
VI.    Concluding  Reflections 


15 
3() 

56 
71 

87 


PART  II. 

WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL,  SOCIAL,  AND 
EVOLUTIONAL  RELATIONS. 

I.    Its  Physiological  Basis 99 

ir.    Concerning  the  Notion  of  Necessity 123 

III.  Involution  and  Evolution 128 

IV.  Mental  Evolution  and  the  Social  Medium    .        .        .    .  ho 
V.    The  Social  Fusion  of  Egoisms 163 

VI.    The  Coercing  Forces  op  Social  Union 17.5 

VII.    Certain  Mental  Products  op  Evolution      .       .       .       .  1S4 


VUl  CONTENTS. 


PART  III. 

WILL  IN  ITS  PATHOLOGICAL  RELATIONS. 

BBCnON  PAGS 

L    Concerning  Degbneeation 237 

II.    Congenital  Deficience  ob  Absence  op  Mobal    Feeling 

AND  Will 243 

III.  Degenebation  op  Moral  Feeling  and  Will  in  Disease    .  257 

IV.  The  Moral  Sense  and  Will  in  Criminals       .        .        .    .  276 
V.    Disorders  of  Will  in  Mental  Derangement       .        .        .  283 

VI.  The  Disintegrations  of  the  '  Ego  ' 301 

VII.  What  will  be  the  End  thereof? 317 


CONCEENING   WILL. 

PART  I. 
WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 


SECTION  I. 

THE    THEORY    OP   FREEWILL   AND   ITS    DIFFICULTIES. 

In  certain  rural  districts  it  is  the  custom  to  speak  of  a  child 
that  has  been  born  out  of  wedlock  as  a  *  chance-child,'  and  of 
its  mother  as  having  had  a  '  misfortune  ; '  not  that  any  one 
really  believes  the  living  event  to  have  come  by  chance,  in 
violation  of  ordinary  law,  without  conceivable  cause,  but  it 
is  an  indirect  way  of  intimating  that  it  ought  not  rightly  to 
have  come,  and  that  it  is  not  certain  who  has  been  concerned 
in  the  begetting  of  it.  One  may  compare  this  way  of  speak- 
ing of  a  natural  event  to  that  used  by  many  of  the  advocates 
of  the  freedom  of  the  will,  who  are  accustomed  to  speak  of  an 
act  of  will  as  if  it  were  a  chance-event;  thereby  meaning,  or 
persuading  themselves  they  mean,  not  that  some  part  of  the 
will,  its  inmost  essence,  is  outside  the  reach  of  present  ex- 
planation, but  that  it  is  actually  outside  the  order  of  natural 
causation :  that  will  is  essentially  a  self-procreating,  self- 
sustaining  spiritual  entity,  which  owns  no  natural  cause, 
obeys  not  law,  and  has  no  sort  of  affinity  with  matter.  An 
immaterial  entity  in  a  material  world,  the  events  of  which 
it  largely  determines — such  the  signal  and  singular  position 
claimed  for  it. 


2  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

For  the  most  part  those  who  uphold  a  power  of  this  kind, 
self-determined  and  self-determining,  free  not  merely  to  act 
but  to  he,  do  not  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  motives  are  not  at 
work  continually  in  the  mind,  or  that  the  will  takes  no 
account  of  them ;  what  they  do  earnestly  protest  is,  that  in 
the  motivation  of  will  there  is  not  the  uniform,  inseparable 
connection  between  motive  and  will  which  there  is  between 
cause  and  effect  in  physical  nature.  In  the  internal  world 
of  mind  there  is  the  self-consciousness  of  a  freedom  that 
is  not  perceivable  nor  conceivable  in  the  extei'nal  world  of 
matter :  the  particular  will  is  not  the  unconditionally 
necessary  consequent  of  antecedent  motives.  It,  or  some 
allied  entity  in  the  individual,  which,  having  abstracted  it 
virtually  from  the  concrete  self,  they  call  his  non-bodily  self, 
has  a  spontaneous,  independent,  arbitrary  power  to  make 
this  or  that  motive  preponderate  as  it  pleases,  to  choose  this 
or  that  one  among  motives  and  to  make  it  the  motive ;  in 
doing  which  the  self-determining  principle  is  held  by  some 
to  act  without  motive,  of  its  own  internal  motion,  without 
other  cause  or  reason  than  pure  self-evolution ;  by  others, 
however,  who  think  it  not  self-sufficing  enough  to  dispense 
entirely  with  motives,  to  take  remote  account  only  of  motives 
of  so  high  and  superlatively  refined  a  nature  that  they  do 
not  weigh  at  all  upon  its  freedom,  insinuating  themselves 
into  its  essence  without  actuating  it,  permeating  and  inspir- 
ing it  without  in  the  least  constraining  it. 

It  would  seem  a  small  matter  whether  such  exceedingly 
subtile  and  highly  sublimed  motives  are  admitted  or  not ; 
since,  so  far  as  there  is  the  assumption  of  a  kind  of  power, 
little  or  much,  fine  or  coarse,  which  is  above  the  reach  of 
actuating  motives  and  able  nevertheless  to  work  as  it  likes 
upon  motives,  absolutely  free  and  independent  in  that  func- 
tion, we  are  no  whit  better  off  than  if  we  assumed  off-hand 
an  arbitrary,  self-determining  power  which  could  do  entirely 
without  motives.  The  initial  difficulty  is  the  capital  one — 
namely,  the  conception,  in  any  degree,  of  a  power  in  nature 
so  extraordinary,  coming  from  an  unknown  without,  having 
no  genesis  but  an  auto-genesis,  deriving  its  subsequent 
energy  from  nothing  but  itself,  subject  to  no  laws  of  growth, 


THE  THEORY  OF  FREEWILL  AND  ITS  DIFFICULTIES.  3 

though  manifestly  growing  in  the  individual  with  his  mental 
growth ;  a  power  which,  notwithstanding  that  it  works  as  a 
part  of  nature,  is  not  of  the  same  kind  nor  has  anything  in 
common  with  anything  else  there — is  without  sympathy, 
affinity,  or  relationship  with  the  things  which  it  works  in 
and  upon.  It  is  not  entirely  right  to  describe  it  as  super- 
natural since  it  thus  works  naturally  and  constantly  in  the 
events  of  the  world  :  supernatural  it  is  in  the  primal  source 
and  perpetual  renewal  of  its  energy,  inscrutably  unnatural 
in  the  mode  of  its  union  with  the  natural. 

If  there  be  a  power  of  this  kind  in  the  universe,  the 
obvious  and  instant  reflection  is  that  causation  is  not  uni- 
versal, as  all  the  world  is  in  the  habit  of  thinking  and  say- 
ing ;  that  there  is  a  large  region  of  human  events  which  lies 
outside  the  otherwise  uniform  law  of  cause  and  effect.  It  is 
a  conclusion  which  cannot  be  evaded ;  for  to  say  that  events 
depend  upon  the  will,  and  in  their  capacity  of  events  are 
natural,  and  not  to  ask  at  all  upon  what  their  cause  depends 
when  it  is  will,  may  be  lawful  and  right  in  pure  metaphysics, 
but  would  be  disastrous  folly  in  physics.  Were  the  conclu- 
sion rigorously  admitted  it  would  be  necessary  to  repudiate 
all  attempts  to  foresee,  formulate,  or  reckon  upon  human 
events  in  so  far  as  they  are  effects  of  will ;  for  how  reduce 
to  laws  phenomena  which  are  the  workings  of  a  power  that 
is  itself  above  the  reach  of  natural  law?  Unawares  we  find 
ourselves  drifted  by  the  theory  into  the  startling  necessity 
of  supposing  that  the  sum  of  energy  in  the  universe  is  not  a 
constant  quantity ;  that  the  law  of  conservation  of  energy, 
though  a  most  useful  work-a-day  theory,  is  at  bottom  an 
illusive  hypothesis  even  within  the  limits  of  human  experi- 
ence ;  that  there  are  now,  and  have  been  since  creation's  dawn, 
countless  myriads  of  sources  of  self-creating  energy  which 
have  poured  their  multitudinous  streams  into  it  continually. 
Creation  of  energy  without  end,  infinite  effect  without  cause ! 
The  great  natural  argument  for  the  existence  of  God  has 
always  been  that  everything  within  human  cognisance  must 
have  a  cause,  such  being  the  necessity  of  human  thought, 
and  that  for  final  cause  of  all  things,  except  itself,  there 
must  be  a  cause  of  causes,  a  great  First  Cause.     What  then 


4  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

of  the  will  ?  We  are  brought  at  the  outset  to  a  perplexing 
dilemma — to  the  obligation  of  confessing  either  that  the 
will,  like  every  other  mode  of  natural  energy,  must  have  a 
cause,  or  that  a  great  First  Cause  is  not  a  necessity  of  human 
thought. 

In  truth,  we  are  tacitly  to  understand  that  it  has  a  cause 
— namely,  the  will  of  God,  inciting  or  restraining.  Although 
not  governed  by  motives  and  without  any  touch  of  earthly 
afl&nity,  the  upholders  of  a  free  will  acknowledge  willingly 
that  it  is  wrought  upon  continually  and  effectively  by  that 
supernatural  energy.  A  Divine  grace  is  always  at  hand  to 
give  it  help  in  time  of  need,  inspiring  and  strengthening  it 
to  do  well,  dissuading  or  withholding  it  from  doing  ill.  It  is 
God's  good  purpose,  says  that  learned  divine.  Dr.  Isaac 
Barrow,  '  to  master  our  will,  and  to  make  us  surrender  and 
resign  it  to  His  just,  wise,  and  gracious  will ; '  and  to  make 
good  His  right  '  God  bendeth  all  His  forces  and  applieth  all 
His  means,  both  of  sweetness  and  severity,  persuading  us  by 
arguments,  soliciting  us  by  entreaties,  alluring  us  by  fair 
promises,  scaring  us  by  fierce  menaces,  indulging  ample 
benefits  to  us,  working  in  and  upon  us  by  secret  influences 
of  grace,  by  visible  dispensations  of  providence.*  A  stu- 
pendous array  of  motives,  which  it  is  a  standing  wonder 
any  one  ever  withstands,  seeing  that  they  are  wielded  by  the 
power  of  Omnipotence  and  guided  by  the  insight  of  Omnisci- 
ence. The  odd  and  perplexing  thing  is  that  we  are  required 
to  believe  that  the  operation  of  these  mighty  agencies  is 
nowise  incompatible  with  the  perfect  freedom  of  the  will, 
which  Indeed  is  supposed  to  be  most  free  when  it  has  sur- 
rendered itself  to  entire  obedience.  No  doubt  when  it  has  thus 
made  an  entire  surrender  of  itself,  and  become,  so  to  speak, 
the  pure  channel  of  the  Divine  will,  it  is  of  the  same  holy 
kind,  one  with  it,  truly  God  in  man  ;  and  without  doubt,  too, 
it  is  then  at  its  best  estate,  most  free,  since  it  has  reached  in 
the  completest  discharge  of  its  possible  functions  the  fullest 
perfection  of  which  its  individual  nature  is  capable ;  but 
with  all  that  it  is  not  easy  to  understand  how  it  can  be  said 
to  be  free  in  the  sense  of  not  being  determined.  The  free- 
dom of  the  fullest  expression  of  energy  belonging  to  the 


THE  THEOEY  OF  EEEEWILL  AND  ITS  DIEEICULTIES.  5 

highest  nature  of  a  thing  is  intelligible  ;  the  freedom  of  an 
energy  from  any  mode  of  determination  is  not  intelligible  to 
human  apprehension,  which  apprehends  only  under  the 
category  of  causation.  Instinctively  urged  by  this  difficulty 
the  theologians  have  found  it  necessary  to  call  in  the  will  of 
Jjrod  as  supreme  determinant.  Perhaps,  however,  they 
might  maintain,  if  challenged  directly  and  pressed  to  answer, 
that  the  high  intuitions  of  consciousness  are  not  fettered  to 
apprehend  under  tlie  category  of  causation. 

So  it  has  come  to  pass  that,  accepting  the  doctrine  of 
invariable  law  in  tlie  physical  world,  they  hold  that  the  spirit 
of  man  stands  above  such  physical  laws  and  '  can  co-operate 
with  God  Himself.'  They  believe  that  they  can  by  such 
Divine  co-operation  fetter  and  so  ennoble  their  wills,  until 
they  are  finally  delivered  from  the  melancholy  liberty  of 
doing  evil,  and  placed  under  the  happy  necessity  of  doing 
well.  So  believing,  their  consistent  prayer  is  the  prayer 
of  Malebranche  to  be  delivered  from  the  fatal  liberty  of 
doing  wrong,'  and  to  feel  themselves  in  the  grasp  of  the 
hand  of  God,  which  will  never  let  them  go.^  The  highest 
evolution  of  freewill  is  freely  to  lose  its  freedom.  Nor  is 
this  to  be  deemed,  as  to  vulgar  apprehension  it  might  seem, 
a  contradiction  in  terms,  or  the  use  of  one  term  to  negate 
the  definite  meaning  of  another,  and  so  to  leave  both  with 
the  appearance  of  life  in  them  but  with  all  meaning  taken  out 
of  them;  rather  it  is  to  have  the  deep  metaphysical  sense  of  a 
mystical  union  of  gaping  inconsistencies  or  of  actual  contra- 
dictories which  reaches  its  climax  in  the  identification  of 
opposites.  In  this  relation,  however,  it  will  not  be  amiss  to 
remember,  by  way  of  caution,  that  many  persons  do  not 
thoroughly  consider  whether  they  distinctly  know  their  own 
meaning,  but  deceive  themselves  in  imagining  that  they 
have  any  distinct  meaning  at  all ;  and  that  of  the  two  issues 

'  Sauveur  des  p^cheurs,  venez  me  delivrer  de  cette  fatale  liberte  que  j'ai 
de  mal  faire,  de  la  certitude  du  pech6,  de  ce  pouvoir  que  je  n'ai  que  trop 
d'abuser  du  mouvement  que  Dieu  ne  me  donne  que  pour  m'elever  jusqu'a  lui. 
— Malebranche,  Meditations  Chretiennes. 

*  *  The  devout  man,'  says  Foster,  in  his  essay  on  Habit  in  Hcligious 
Character,  'feels  this  confirmed  habit  as  the  grasp  of  the  hand  of  God, 
which  will  never  let  him  go.' 


6  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

— first,  that  opposites  are  identical ;  secondly,  that  meaning- 
less propositions  are  made — the  latter  is  the  more  probable. 

The  consistent  advocates  of  the  Divine  inspiration  of 
the  truly  free  will  used  at  one  time  to  make  large  appeal  to 
_the  will  of  the  Devil,  who  worked  through  the  evil  desires  and 
passions  with  which  he  inspired  human  breasts.  Presumably 
there  was  a  perfect  construction  of  the  brain  in  the  first  man, 
and  for  that  reason  there  was  no  let  or  hindrance  to  an  entire 
obedience  of  the  perfect  will  in  him  to  the  perfect  will  of 
God ;  but  unhappily  injury  was  done  to  this  excellent  struc- 
ture by  the  fall  in  Eden,  and  so  the  arch-enemy  of  mankind 
gained  admission  and  made  his  congenial  home  there.  They 
recognised  justly,  as  moralists  have  always  done,  the  existence 
of  a  double  nature  in  fallen  man — the  higher  and  the  lower 
nature,  the  spirit  and  the  flesh,  the  good  and  the  bad  angel 
in  him,  the  old  Adam  and  the  new  creature — in  like  manner 
as  they  recognised  two  principles,  a  good  and  an  evil  one, 
warring  always  against  one  another  in  the  outer  world  ;  and 
the  Devil  they  acknowledged  to  be  the  lord  of  the  part  of 
man's  nature  the  inclinations  of  which  were  evilwards. 
'  Doth  Job  serve  God  for  naught  ?  '  cynically  asks  Satan, 
deeply  sensible  of  the  influence  of  motives  upon  the  will  to 
make  it  do  well ;  and  in  the  operation  of  the  successive 
motives,  each  weighing  more  heavily,  which  he  brings  to 
bear  upon  Job  in  order  to  make  him  curse  God,  he  aff'ords  us 
an  illustration  of  the  way  in  which  he  works  upon  the  will 
to  make  it  do  ill.  But  it  was  plainly  necessary,  on  the  theory 
of  a  Devil  always  at  work  to  beleaguer  and  besiege  the 
citadel  of  human  virtue,  to  limit  his  power,  as  God  limited 
it  in  the  interesting  psychological  experiment  which  in  a 
caprice  of  freewill  he  sufifered  him  to  make  upon  Job ; 
otherwise  what  would  have  become  of  human  freedom  ? 
Had  man  been  left  under  the  melancholy  necessity  of  doing 
evil,  where  would  have  been  the  happy  liberty  of  loving  God 
and  of  doing  that  which  was  right  in  His  sight  ? 

It  was  necessary  that  the  Devil  should  have  not  un- 
limited power,  but  full  power  only  to  work  his  worst  within 
fixed  bounds ;  first,  because  he  was  in  the  ultimate  event 
controlled  by  Divine  power,  who  hath  put  all  things  under 


THE  THEORY  OF  FEEEWELL  AND  ITS  DIFFICULTIES.  7 

Him,  and  without  whom  was  nothing  made  that  is  made — 
not  excepting  the  Devil  and  his  deeds — and  who  (according 
to  the  Westminster  Confession  of  Faith)  has  for  '  the  mani- 
festation of  His  glory  predestinated  some  men  and  angels 
unto  everlasting  life  and  preordained  others  to  everlasting 
death,  to  the  praise  of  His  glorious  justice ; '  and,  secondly, 
because  He  wrought  through  the  passions  and  other  low 
impulses  of  the  human  heart,  which,  by  the  antecedent 
postulate  as  to  the  will's  nature,  could  not  cross  the  inter- 
vening gulf  to  touch  its  inmost  self-determining  essence.  It 
would  be  weU  could  we  have  it  plainly  expounded  some- 
where why  this  inmost  spiritual  essence,  being  untouched  by 
earthly  affection  or  hindrance,  unswayed  by  motive,  accessi- 
ble only  to  Divine  influence,  absolutely  free  to  do  as  it  likes, 
at  any  rate  in  the  way  of  well-doing,  does  not  like  to  rule  as 
it  might ;  but  it  is  a  problem  which  is  suffered  to  remain 
as  obscure  as  the  question  why  the  pure  essence  can 
habitually  and  easily  cross  the  gulf  between  itself  and  the 
physical  organism,  when  the  gulf  is  quite  impassable  in  the 
opposite  direction.  However  that  may  be,  it  is  plain  that 
we  have  no  means  by  which  we  can  measure  and  register  the 
quantity  and  kind  of  energy  which  the  Devil  exerts  upon 
the  will  within  the  bounds  set  to  his  operations— no  workable 
Diabolometer  or  Satanometer  so  to  speak — and  that  we  have 
here  again  a  large  region  of  human  events  which  is  outside 
the  natural  law  of  causation,  and  therefore  outside  the  range 
of  scientific  knowledge ;  a  region,  moreover,  of  quite  unknown 
extent,  seeing  that  it  is  impossible  to  define  its  hmits  or  to 
get  them  defined.  Apart,  then,  from  the  disturbing  and 
undefinable  operations  of  an  undetermined  will  in  human 
events,  we  have  the  disturbing  and  undefinable  operations  of 
will  determined  by  diabolic  power.  Meanwhile,  if  we  are 
really  to  think  of  freedom  as  absolute  and  perfect  in  man — a 
perfect  freedom  from  the  necessity  of  any  antecedence — we 
ought  logically  to  think  of  it  as  free  from  all  influence  of 
God  or  Devil,  as  will,  that  is,  in  which  the  Onmipresent  is 
not  present  and  the  Omnipotent  has  no  power. 

Notwithstanding  these  theories   of  a  will  that  is  itself 
an  inexhaustible  source  of  self -procreating  energy  and  of  acts 


8  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

of  will  instigated  by  supernatural  agency,  men  have  always 
conducted  practical  life  on  an  implicit  theory  of  a  quite 
opposite  nature  ;  they  have  lived  and  acted  in  all  places  and 
at  all  times  and  on  all  occasions  as  if  the  will  were  governed 
by  natural  motives,  and  as  if  its  operations  could  be  reckoned 
upon  with  some  assurance.  The  dogma  of  freewill  has  been 
a  cherished  dogma  of  the  study,  but  it  has  not  imbued  the 
regulations  made  for  the  conduct  of  life ;  exalted  and 
esteemed  as  a  theoretical  article  of  faith,  it  has  not  been  used 
as  a  working  belief  in  human  affairs  ;  an  ideal  of  the  imagi- 
nation inspired  by  the  heart,  it  has  had  no  place  in  the  work 
of  the  practical  understanding.  When  it  has  been  neces- 
sary so  to  train  men  as  to  be  able  to  rely  upon  their  conduct 
with  certitude  in  the  most  arduous  circumstances,  they  have 
been  subjected  to  stern  discipline  by  the  rigid  enforcement 
of  uniform  motives ;  and  accordingly  the  military  organisa- 
tion affords  the  best  example  of  a  case  in  which,  the  exact 
nature  and  number  of  the  motives  being  known,  their  opera- 
tion on  will  is  plainly  shown  and  confidently  counted  on.  Were 
the  motives  as  definite  and  as  exactly  known  in  every  other 
case,  and  their  secret  operations  through  their  manifold 
indirect,  subtile  and  circuitous  paths  traced  with  equal 
plainness,  is  it  not  likely  that  a  similar  uniformity  would 
be  made  known  ? 

Laws  have  been  made  from  the  earliest  times  and  punish- 
ments inflicted  systematically  upon  lawbreakers  under  the 
tacit  implication  that  will  is  not  an  undetermined  power,  but 
that  it  may  be  influenced  by  motive  to  act  in  this  way  or 
that.  The  execution  of  a  murderer  would  be  of  no  use  as  a 
warning  to  likeminded  evildoers  had  they  the  freedom  of  will 
not  to  be  moved  by  the  example ;  the  aim  and  use  of  punish- 
ment are  to  determine  the  ill-disposed  will  from  the  direction 
of  wrong-doing  and  to  constrain  it  to  take  the  path  of  a  higher 
and  freer  development  in  well-doing.  And  that  has  plainly 
been  the  slow  effect  of  the  administration  of  laws  upon  the 
conscience  of  mankind  through  the  ages ;  necessary  in  the 
first  instance  to  constrain  moral  action,  and  by  repetition  so 
in  the  course  of  generations  to  ingrain  the  habit  of  it  as  a 
moral  feeling,  they  become  unnecessary  as  determinants  in 


THE  THEORY  OF  FREEWILL  AND  ITS  DIFFICULTIES.  9 

well-constituted  beings,  once  the  sense  of  right  and  wrong 
has  become  instinct  in  their  natures.  In  such  case  the 
reasoned  object  fades  out  of  sight,  and  the  operation  becomes 
immediate  and  instinctive  ;  it  is  an  instance  of  use-made 
nature  such  as  is  seen  everywhere  in  the  transformation  of 
laborious  conscious  into  easy  automatic  function.  Moral  de- 
velopment of  the  individual  is  a  growth  of  will  in  the  line  of 
good  motive,  moral  deterioration  a  growth  of  will  in  the  line 
of  bad  motive.  The  progress  of  mankind  from  lower  to 
higher  planes  of  thought,  feeling  and  doing  is  the  record  of 
better  action  founded  on  and  guided  by  wiser  insight,  and  of 
the  development  of  better  feeling  in  consequence :  higher 
feeling  has  followed  improved  thinking  and  acting,  and  so 
the  quality  of  the  will  has  been  raised. 

No  one  disputes  that  a  knowledge  of  the  past  actions  of 
men  in  different  situations  and  circumstances  of  life  is  the 
foundation  of  a  knowledge  of  the  springs  of  human  action  on 
which  we  rely  in  our  present  and  count  in  our  future  dealings 
with  them.  The  study  of  history  would  be  a  barren  labour 
if  the  operations  of  a  self-determining  entity  left  no  room 
for  dependence  upon  the  determining  effects  of  motives,  nor 
would  the  most  sagacious  statesman  in  that  case  be  any 
better  off  in  the  functions  of  government,  notwithstanding 
a  lifelong  experience,  than  a  fool.  In  every  department  of 
human  activity  the  person  who  has  had  experience  is 
esteemed  a  wiser  guide  than  the  new  comer,  because  of  the 
certitude  that  the  thoughts  and  acts  of  men  are  not  in  any 
respect  chance-events,  but  that  what  they  have  done  before 
they  will  do  again  when  actuated  by  similar  motives  in 
similar  circumstances.  The  systematic  provisions  made  for 
the  education  and  training  of  the  young — which  are  really 
means  to  manufacture  them  to  an  approved  pattern  by  im- 
planting in  them  the  customary  habits  of  thinking,  feeling 
and  willing  of  the  community — social  institutions  and 
usages,  forethought  and  skill  in  the  conduct  of  affairs,  all 
the  operations  of  daily  life  in  the  intercourse  of  sane  men 
are  based  upon  the  tacit  implication  that  acts  of  will  are 
not  motiveless  and  haphazard,  but  conform  to  law  and 
may  be  counted  upon.     Do  T   submit  a  dispute  to  an  im- 


10  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

partial  judge  in  the  full  assurance  of  having  justice  done  to 
me,  I  do  it  because  I  believe  that  he  will  decide  according 
to  well-weighed  reasons  of  law,  and  because  I  do  not  believe 
in  the  hazard  of  his  freewill.  If  a  person  of  acknowledged 
probity  and  of  known  purity  of  life  were  suddenly  to  do 
something  grossly  immoral,  and  it  were  impossible  to 
discover  any  motive  for  his  strange  and  aberrant  deed,  we 
should  ascribe  it  to  an  alienation  of  nature,  and  say  that 
he  must  be  mad.  Let  the  will  be  free  in  the  full  meta- 
physical sense  of  the  word,  and  it  would  be  impossible  to 
run  an  express  train  from  London  to  York  or  to  cross  the 
Atlantic  in  a  steamboat  with  the  least  assurance  of  safety. 
Did  not  men  in  some  measure  foresee  the  acts  of  their  fellows 
from  a  knowledge  of  the  operations  of  motives  in  their  minds, 
they  would  have  to  await  them  in  helpless  uncertainty,  as 
they  await  the  decrees  of  the  will  of  God. 

The  person  who  answers  best,  who  alone  answers  near, 
to  Ih'e  metaphysical  definition  of  freewill  is  the  madman, 
since  he  exults  in  the  most  vivid  sense  of  freedom  and  power, 
heeds  not  any  counsels  of  reason,  and  does  things  which  he 
does  not  himself  foresee  or  meditate  a  moment  beforehand, 
and  which  certainly  no  one  can  foretell ;  if  it  be  not  that  he 
acts  without  motives,  he  acts  from  motives  of  which  he  is 
not  conscious,  and  which  no  other  person  can  penetrate. 
Consciousness  plays  him  an  ill  trick  ;  for  while  he  is  really 
the  least  fi'ee  of  men,  irresponsible,  his  disease  not  he 
instigating  his  deeds,  it  inspires  an  intense  and  exulting 
conviction  of  the  highest  freedom.  Is  it  not  obvious  that  if 
sane  men  possessed  free  wills,  they,  like  the  madman,  would 
be  free  from  responsibility,  since  their  wills  would  act  in- 
dependently of  their  characters,  just  as  they  listed — not 
otherwise  than  as  a  wayward  wind  was  once  supposed  to 
blow  capriciously  '  where  it  listeth  ' — and  that  no  one  would 
have  much,  if  any,  motive  left  to  try  to  better  his  character? 
For  why  take  diligent  thought  and  pains  to  build  up  good 
motives  into  the  structure  of  a  character,  and  to  reject  bad 
motives,  if  he  be  subject  to  the  chance  of  a  freewill  which 
need  take  no  account  of  them  ?  Consider  this  difficulty  :  if 
there  be  complete  equilibrium,  a  perfect  indifference,  there 


THE  THEOKY  OF  FREEWILL  AND   ITS  DIFFICULTIES.         11 

will  be  no  decision ;  if  a  decision  in  equilibrium,  tlie  fact  is 
inconsistent  with  any  essential  connection  between  character 
and  actio ri. 

No  deep  attention  to  their  writings  is  needed  to  discover 
that  the  moral  and  religious  authors  who  nurse  the  most 
fervent  conviction  of  freewill,  and  reject  passionately  the 
notion  of  necessity  in  human  actions,  do  nevertheless  use 
language  habitually  which  is  imbued  with  the  imj)lication 
of  determination,  containing  it,  as  it  were,  by  silent  involu- 
tion.' Indeed,  it  is  impossible  for  them  to  help  it :  the  fact 
is  embodied  in  all  the  perceptions,  thoughts,  feelings,  even 
the  modes  of  sensibility,  of  mankind,  and  in  the  inmost 
texture  of  the  language  by  which  expression  is  given  to  them ; 
for  such  thoughts,  feelings,  and  words  are  possible  to  any 
individual  now  by  virtue  only  of  the  law-governed  acquisi- 
tions, the  experience-built  mental  structure,  of  an  inhnite 
succession  of  generations  of  men.  The  exquisitely  nice  and 
fine  movements  which  we  perform  in  each  act  of  seeing  or 
hearing,  without  being  in  the  least  aware  of  them,  represent 
the  sum  of  an  incalculable  multitude  of  slowly  elaborated 
experiences  that  have  been  organised  as  faculties  or  func- 
tions :  they  are  virtually  unconscious  reasonings.  Our  intui- 
tion of  space  may  well  be  in  like  manner  the  consolidations 
of  an  intinite  succession  of  human  experiences  that  defi- 
nite movements  on  our  part  have  always  definite  and 
uniforai  results  which,  when  making  them,  we  can  definitely 
reckon  on. 

Be  that  so  or  not,  however,  there  is  not  a  word  we  utter, 
not  a  movement  we  make,  not  a  sensation  we  experience, 
not  a  tool  we  make  use  of,  not  an  article  of  clothing  we 
wear,  that  has  not  the  same  far-reaching  significance.  Our 
forefathers,  by  intending  their  minds  to  realities,  have 
established  a  harmony  of  thought  with  external  nature 
which  is  a  pre-established  harmony  in  our  nature.  '  Oblige 
me  with  a  light '  is  a  trivial  favour  which  onf  man  begs  and 
obtains  of  another,  hardly  deeming  that  he  is  asking  a  favour 

"  To  say  that  the  will  chooses  which  motives  to  reject,  and  which  to  accept, 
what  is  that  but  to  imply  that  it  cannot  act  from  the  motives  that  it  rejects, 
and  must  act  in  accordance  with  the  motives  that  it  accepts  ? 


/ 


12  WILL  IN   ITS   METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

at  all ;  and  yet  if  we  consider  tlie  matter  closely,  and  unfold 
tlie  constitutional  history  of  the  event,  so  to  speak,  the  request 
has  stupendous  contents ;  for  what  a  long  succession  of  toils 
and  troubles,  ingenuities  and  endeavours,  trials  and  failures, 
accidental  hits  and  misses  of  experiment,  tedious  steps  of 
improvement  it  implies  from  the  time  when  fire  had  not  yet 
eeen  discovered  to  the  time — only  some  fifty  years  ago — 
when  the  lucifer  match  was  invented !  Before  the  person 
who  asks  the  little  favour  exerts  his  freewill  to  ask  it  he 
ought  to  make  a  sort  of  silent  recognition  of  the  successive 
agres  of  human  culture  to  the  fruits  of  whose  labours  he  is  a 
joyful  heir.  Happy  for  him  that  they  did  not  content  them- 
selves with  capricious  freaks  of  freewill,  beginning  nowhere 
and  ending  nowhere,  but  with  many  halting  experiments, 
with  slowly  gained  insight  and  tedious  labour,  patiently 
making  each  toilsome  step  gained  the  basis  of  new  efforts  to 
reach  a  higher  step,  multiplied  their  relations  with  nature, 
and  brought  themselves  into  ever-widening  and  closer 
harmony  with  the  order  thereof ;  so  endowing  him  with  a 
large  capital  of  silent  wisdom  to  start  with,  with  the 
capacities  of  definite  desires  to  urge  him  in  the  directions  of 
i)rogress,  and  with  built  up  faculties  of  will  to  execute  his 
desires. 

To  set  forth  explicitly  in  formal  knowledge  what  is  im- 
plicit in  the  whole  course  and  conduct  of  human  life  would 
unquestionably  be  the  exposition  of  a  system  of  philosophy 
in  which  a  self-determining  principle  had  no  place — in  which 
a  free,  in  the  sense  of  an  undetermined,  will  would  be  a 
meaningless  superfluity.  But  is  it  not  the  fact  that  know- 
ledge has  its  foundation  in  experience,  and  is  the  conscious 
^exposition  of  what  is  unconsciously  implied  in  humau  pro- 
gress ;  that  it  exists  in  fact  before  it  is  self-conscious  in 
thought?  Implicit  in  action  before  it  is  explicit  in  formal 
thought,  it  grows  out  of  the  twilight  of  instinct  into  the 
daylight  of  clear  consciousness ;  nay,  perhaps  we  must  go 
"deeper  than  instinct,  into  the  complete  darkness  of  vital 
relations,  in  order  to  reach  the  foundations  of  that  which 
we  know  self-consciously  as  reason.  It  is  proposed  nowa- 
days to  get  a  sound  and  substantial  knowledge  of  the  laws 


THE  THEORY  OF  FREEWILL   AND   ITS   DIFFICULTIES.         13 

of  tlioug-Lt  by  a  careful  study  of  its  genesis ;  the  purpose  is 
good,  but  it  cannot  plainly  be  accomplished  by  a  method  of 
introspection,  which  will  never  take  us  back  to  the  be- 
ginnings, since  the  faculty  of  it  comes  to  maturity  only 
when  thought  has  reached  a  high  development.  Is  it  then 
by  a  sympathetic  study  of  the  mental  phenomena  of  animals 
and  infants  that  we  shall  succeed  better  ?  It  is  a  method 
of  much  fruitful  promise,  but  at  the  same  time  inadequate 
and  apt  to  be  misleading,  since  we  are  unable  to  enter  into 
the  comparative  simplicity  of  their  minds  with  a  corre- 
sponding simplicity  of  mind,  and  so  are  apt  to  misread  and 
misinterpret  the  signs  that  we  observe ;  and  in  the  best 
event  it  is  not  sufficing,  since  it  starts  a  long  way  from  the 
actual  genesis.  Only  by  a  close  objective  study  of  the  un- 
conscious ojperations  of  thought-generating  organic  matter 
shall  we  ever  attend  at  the  birth  of  thought.  Find  out  the 
laws  of  adaptive  interaction,  in  their  simplest  expression,  of 
that  organic  matter  which,  when  its  energies  rise  above  the 
horizon  of  consciousness,  we  call  reason,  and  you  will  arrive 
at  the  foundation-facts  of  the  highest  thought.  So  far  as  the 
Amoeba  reasons — and  reason  unconsciously  it  does  in  so  far 
as  it  makes  vital  adaptations  to  its  surroundings — it  exhibits 
the  principle  of  that  which  in  its  more  complex  evolution  in 
the  brains  of  the  higher  animals  and  of  man  is  reason. 

By  a  study  of  the  operations  of  intelligence  in  its  highest 
developments  we  perceive  a  reverse  operation  that  brings  us 
to  the  same  physical  result — namely,  to  reason  become  habit 
or  instinct,  that  is  to  say,  to  reason  incorporate  in  structure. 
The  simplest  proposition  we  can  make — as,  for  example, 
that  the  dog  barks — which  seems  neither  to  need  nor  to 
admit  analysis,  means  actually  the  consolidation  of  as  many 
laborious  acquisitions  as  an  habitual  act  which  looks  equally 
simple,  since  we  perform  it  without  knowing  it,  but  which 
we  have  learnt  only  by  long  practice.  Each  simple  affirma- 
tion or  judgment  which  has  itself  been  acquired  gradually 
and  fixed  mentally,  becomes,  by  association,  an  accessoiy 
idea  of,  and  afterwards,  by  closer  integration,  an  unconscious 
element  of,  a  more  complex  judgment ;  and  so  the  process 
goes   on   in   ascending   complexity  to   the   formation  of  a 


14  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL    ASPECT. 

mental  compound  which  means  a  great  mauy  simpler  com- 
pounds or  elements.  We  might  compare  it  then  to  a  grand 
and  noble  river  which,  when  traced  back  to  its  source  in  a 
little  rill,  is  seen  to  have  grown  by  the  successive  inflows  of 
many  similar  little  streams. 

We  think  so  much  of  consciousness  in  the  functions  of 
human  intelligence  that  we  do  not  sufficiently  realise  how 
much  the  body  can  do  without  it,  but  insist  wrongly  on 
making  it  essential  to  operations  in  which  it  has  really  no 
essential  concern.  Men  do  not  divine  truth  and  then  work 
to  it  with  set  deliberation :  they  reasoned  during  centuries 
before  they  knew  a  single  rule  of  logic;  made  instinctive 
and  traditional  adaptations  to  natural  laws  before  general- 
ising about  them ;  used  language  instinctively  without 
dreaming  that  it  was  a  slow  elaboration  through  the  ages, 
embodying  the  successive  growths  of  intelligence  ;  practised 
virtue  as  a  custom  before  a  single  rule  of  virtue  was  ever 
formulated.  Indeed,  had  not  man  been  virtuous  before  he 
found  out  rules  of  virtue  he  would  never  have  been  virtuous 
at  all.  Knowledge  is  instinct  in  life  before  it  is  under- 
standing, is  in  the  air  around  before  it  is  in  the  conception 
and  speech ;  and  when  in  mature  season  the  unconscious 
bursts  into  consciousness,  the  man  of  genius  is  the  organ 
through  which  the  expansion  takes  place ;  he  is  the  inter- 
preter of  its  blind  impulses  to  the  age,  and  gives  them 
thenceforth  clear  utterance  and  definite  aim. 

Such  are  the  formidable  facts  which  confront  and  con- 
tradict the  metaphysical  theory  of  freewill :  compendiously 
statecl,  they  are  practical  human  life.  For  certainly  the 
practical  experience  of  the  whole  world  from  the  beginning 
unto  now  is,  that  will  as  it  works  in  human  affairs  is  a  power 
which  does  not  stand  outside  the  range  of  natural  causation'; 
wherefore  when  men  have  formulated  scientifically  their 
practical  philosophy,  when  they  have  set  forth  explicitly  the 
principles  that  are  implicit  in  actual  life,  they  will  be  hard 
put  to  it  to  find  there  a  suitable  niche  for  the  doctrine  of  an 
undetermined  will.  Meanwhile  the  advocates  of  the  dogma 
may  continue  to  cultivate  freewill  as  an  ideal,  making  of  it 
a  sort  of  holy  shrine  in  their  minds,  and  from  ti  me  to  time. 


THE   THEORY   OF  FREEWILL  AND   ITS  DIFFICULTIES.      15 

as  they  bethink  themselves,  doing  it  reverence  ;  taking  good 
care  the  while,  however,  to  leave  it  in  holy  seclusion,  and  not 
to  introduce  it  into  the  affairs  of  daily  life. 

Thus  far  then  the  dogma  of  freewill  comes  out  as  incon- 
sistent— first,  with  the  fact  that  true  doctrine  is  the  explicit 
declaration  of  what  is  implicit  in  the  constitution  and  ex- 
perience of  mankind,  the  uprising  into  formal  consciousness 
of  that  which  existed  tacitly  below  its  threshold;  and, 
secondly,  with  the  acknowledgment  of  the  universality  of 
causation  within,  human  experience.  A  third  class  of 
adverse  considerations  will  be  laid  bare  by  a  close  criticism 
of  certain  commonly  accepted  but  not  indisputably  war- 
ranted assumptions  of  the  metaphysical  method ;  and  it  is 
with  them  that  I  go  on  to  deal  in  the  next  section. 


SECTIOIST  II. 

"WHAT   CONSCIOUSNESS   TELLS    US    CONCEENING  WILL. 

Let  us  now  inquire  closely  what  are  the  grounds  and  reasons 
of  the  metaphysician's  clear  conviction  that  he  has  a  will 
and  that  it  is  free.  His  consciousness  makes  him  the  revela- 
tion in  so  plain  and  sure  a  way  that  all  the  counterargu- 
ments in  the  world  cannot  invalidate  its  direct  and  positive 
testimony.  A  pity  it  is  that  consciousness  in  this  matter 
cannot  swear  its  own  interpreter.  It  will  be  well  to  examine 
rigorously  how  much  it  actually  does  tell  him  in  respect 
of  these  two  allegations — first,  that  he  has  a  will;  and, 
secondly,  that  it  is  free ;  since  it  may  be  that  it  does  not 
directly  tell  him  all  that  he  is  in  the  habit  of  believing  and 
declaring  it  does. 

Is  it  true  then  that  we  know  immediately  by  conscious- 
ness that  we  have  such  an  entity  as  the  metaphysician 
means  by  will  ?  No,  it  is  not  true ;  for  it  appears,  when 
we  consider  the  matter  closely,  that  a  great  part  of  that 

/confident  dogma  is  not  an  immediate  deliverance  which  is 
certain   and   cannot  be  disputed,  but  a  mediate    inference 


^ 


16  WILL   IN   ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

which  is  liable  to  the  causes  of  fallacy  to  -which  all  observa- 
tion and  inference  are  liable.  Consciousness  tells  us  nothing 
whatever  of  a  general  will  or  an  abstract  will-entity ;  what 


it  does  make  known  to  us  is  a  'particular  volition  when  we 
have  it,  the  expenditure  of  an  energy  in  doing  or  in  for- 
bearing to  do,  and,  antecedent  to  that  energy,  the  possible 
choice  of  another  course  than  the  one  adopted  :  an  alterna- 
tive course  which  might  be  taken  if  it  pleased  us  to  take  it, 
which  has  perhaps  been  taken  in  similar  circumstances  before, 
but  which  we  take  not  now  because  it  does  not  please  us  to 
take  it ;  if  a  lower  course,  because  we  have  higher  likings  at 
the  instant;  if  a  higher  course,  because  we  have  lower 
likings  at  the  instant.  Take  notice  here  that  the  choice  iy 
_antecedent  to  the  energy  we  are  conscious  of  as  will :  not 
known  as  a  contemporaneous  direct  deliverance,  and  &o 
having  the  certitude  of  an  immediate  intuition  ;  known  only 
through  memory,  and  subj[ect  to  the  fallacies  to  which  every 
act  of  memory,  whether  covering  an  instant  or  a  day,  is 
subject. 

Consider  further  what  is  the  '  we,'  the  ego,  the  person, 
who  pleases  or  does  not  please  in  "such  case  to  do  or  not  to 
do.  Not  any  abstract  entity  but  the  concrete  individual ; 
not  any  unseen  noumenon  behind  the  phenomena,  but  the 
noumenon  working  in  the  phenomena;  not  any  extremely 
sublimed  and  fine  essence  from  which  all  substance  has  been 
eliminated,  but  a  feeling,  thinking  and  acting  organism  the 
whole  of  which  works  in  each  part,  and  each  part  in  the 
whole.  'Tis'I,'  compact  of  nerve,  muscle,  gland,  bone, 
who  choose  to  resolve  to  do  or  not  to  do  on  each  occasion, 
not  any  part  or  detached  principle  or  sublimed  essence  of 
me.  From  his  holiest  feeling  and  his  loftiest  aspiration,  let 
him  torture  himself  as  he  will,  the  most  saintly  person 
cannot  detach  the  influence  of  the  most  despised  organ  of 
his  body.  The  creation  of  an  abstract  will  that  is  supposed 
to  execute  the  particular  volition  and  its  further  fashioning 
into  a  spiritual  entity  is  an  inference  or  hypothesis,  not  a 
direct  deliverance  of  consciousness;  be  it  necessary  or  be  it 
gratuitous,  that  is  its  undoubted  character.  With  equal 
reason  might  one  claim  to  make  an  abstract  entity  of  sensa- 


'  I  \l 


WHAT   CONSCIOUSNESS  TELLS   US   CONCERNING  WILL.         17 

tion,  for  '  I  *  feel  as  well  as  will,  and  to  maintain  tliat  this 
entity  was  necessary  to  produce  each  sensation ;  or  to  postu- 
late a  special  emotional  entity  operating  in  each  emotion ; 
or,  going  further  in  the  same  direction  of  entity-making,  to 
create  a  spirit  of  greenness  which  is  the  cause  of  green  things 
looking  green  ;  or  to  discover  a  spirit  of  stoneness  which  lies 
behind  the  material  nature  of  stone.  In  that  way  we  might 
please  ourselves  to  people  nature  with  infinite  multitudes  of 
entities,  or  invisible  spirits  of  visible  things,  but  they  would 
be  superfluous  in  fact,  as  they  are  not  apprehensible  in 
thought,  and  of  no  interest  save  as  playful  essays  of  imagi- 
nation always  eager  and  pleased  to  exercise  its  energy.  For 
it  is  noteworthy  that  the  imagination  needs  no  spur  in  order 
_to_work ;  nnlike  the  reason^  whose  exercise  costs  the  pain  of 
_effort,  its  function  is  too  eager  and  easy,  the  Jiard  matter 
being  t^  hold  it  in  and  discipline  it.  That  is  the  reason  __ 
why  it  is  so  much  easier  to  lie  than  to  speak  the  truth  :  no 
training  is  required  to  learn  to  lie,  but  the  sternnest  mental 
discipline  is  necessary  to  implant  a  habit  of  strict  truth  in 
thought  and  word  and  deed,  and  will  not  succeed  then  if  the 
foundations  are  faulty. 

What  the  metaphysician  has  done  is  plain  enough :  he 
has  converted  into  an  entity  the  general  term  which  embraces 
the  multitude  of  particular  volitions,  themselves  varying 
infinitely  in  power  and  quality,  and  has  then  referred  them 
all  to  it  as  cause.  So  he  talks  habitually  as  if  will  had 
always  the  same  nature,  whereas  there  is  no  such  thing  as 
one  and  the  same  will-nature ;  each  will  having  its  own 
nature  and  development,  being  itself  an  independent  reality. 
With  the  disposition,  powers,  and  habits  of  each  mind  as 
different  as  the  constitution,  temper  and  activity  of  each 
body,  and  with  the  several  variations  of  temper  in  each  body 
\  at  different  times,  how  can  the  will  fail  to  be  different  ?  Like 
it  may  be  in  different  persons,  and  on  different  occasions  in 
the  same  person,  but  it  is  never  identical ;  it  is  always  in- 
dividual, particular.  A  general  will  is  not  an  entity,  it  is 
no  more  than  a  notion.  No  wonder  that  there  is  neither 
common  end  nor  end  to  philosophical  disquisitions  concerning 
a  notion  of  which  each  person  is  free  to  have  his  own  notion. 


/ 


18  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL   ASPECT. 

If  now  it  be  admitted  tliat  ia  the  common  will-theory  we  \ 
have  to  do  with  an  inference  not  with  a  direct  deliverance 
of  consciousness,  the  claim  next  put  forward  will  be  that  it 
is  a  necessary  inference,  because  there  must  be  some  basis  of 
continuity,  some  bond  of  unity,  between  particular  volitions, 
between  the  will  of  today  and  the  will  of  yesterday.  Some 
constant  essence  with  sense  of  continuity  and  unity,  some- 
thing which  is  one  behind  the  separate  volitions,  is  a 
necessary  postulate  of  thought ;  and  it  is  inconceivable  that 
matter  can  furnish  such  a  basis  of  unity.  The  ego  would  be 
the  sport  of  impressions,  they  say,  if  it  had  not  a  free  power 
over  them  to  hold  and  to  reject,  to  associate  and  to  separate ; 
not  otherwise,  I  suppose,  than  as  in  chemistry,  were  there 
no  free  chemical  ego,  definite  separations  and  combinations 
could  not  take  place — one  element  not  leave  one  compound 
to  join  another,  unless  it  were  guided  by  that  internal  spon- 
taneity. 

Those  who  talk  in  that  way  think  of  matter  as  inert 
and  inanimate  ;  they  fail  to  realise,  first,  that  matter  is  not 
inert,  there  being  in  the  simplest  molecule  the  complexity 
of  movement  of  the  entire  solar  system ;  and,  secondly, 
they  lack  the  conception  of  the  most  complex  matter  and  its 
manifold  energies  individuated  as  a  living  organism,  and 
what  that  conception  implies. 

Now,  in  regard  of  the  common  conception  of  matter,  it 
is  plainly  that  of  something  gross  and  tangible,  inert  and 
subject  to  gravitation ;  and  naturally  so  gross  a  conception 
of  it  is  utterly  inconsistent  with  any  possible  conception 
of  the  matter  of  mind.  Because  we  cannot  conceive  a 
millstone  having  anything  to  do  with  mind,  we  protest 
that  mind  has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  any  sort  of 
matter.*      But   chemical   atoms,   which  we   have   the   best 

'  It  is  certain  that  from  all  the  millstones  in  the  world  heaped  together  we 
could  not  derive  mind,  nor  from  all  the  inorganic  bodies  in  the  world,  nor 
from  all  the  organic  substances  other  than  the  most  complex  organic  develop- 
ment of  matter  in  the  highest  nervous  system  ;  but  does  it  therefore  follow 
that  we  could  not  get  it  from  this  last  ?  Are  not  the  energies  of  organic 
matter  as  different  as  its  qualities  ?  And  what  is  the  special  energy  of  the 
most  complex  organisation  of  the  highest  nervous  system,  if  it  be  not  mental  ? 
Those  who  protest  that  it  is  not  mental  should  at  least  tell  us  what  it  is. 


WHAT   CONSCIOUSNESS   TELLS   US   CONCERNING  WILL.        19 

reason  to  believe  are  not,  like  geometrical  points,  pure 
abstractions  but  realities,  are  exceedingly  active,  notwith- 
standing that  they  are  invisible,  intangible,  inappreciable 
by  sense  of  any  kind,  actually  suprasensual — spiritualised 
matter,  so  to  speak :  though  we  might  say  of  them,  in 
Jeremy  Taylor's  words,  that  they  cannot  trouble  the  eye 
nor  vex  the  tenderest  part  of  a  wound,  yet  it  is  by  their 
union  in  infinite  numbers  that  they  form  dimensions  and 
constitute  the  gross  matter  of  the  world  that  our  senses 
take  cognisance  of.  Manifestly  then  the  first  necessity  is 
a  just  conception  of  the  infinitely  subtile  activities  of  the 
infinitely  minute  atoms  of  matter. 

Next,  in  regard  of  the  conception  of  an  organism,  it  is 
necessary  to  apprehend  and  realise  that  it  is  a  physiological 
union  of  various  tissues  and  diverse  organs,  each  tissue, 
and  much  more  each  organ,  itself  infinitely  complex,  so 
bound  together  in  structure  and  function,  and  so  unified 
by  suitable  co-ordinating  mechanism,  that  the  part  every- 
where works  in  the  whole,  and  the  whole  in  every  part; 
nowhere  else  in  nature  are  diversities  and  integration  of 
diversities  carried  to  such  a  height ;  nowhere  is  the  realisa- 
tion of  complete  unity  in  manifold  diversity  more  signal. 
Since  Bichat's  time,  who  first  directed  and  enforced  attention 
to  the  properties  of  the  particular  tissues,  showing  that  the 
life  of  the  organism  was  the  sum  of  the  lives  of  their  indi- 
vidual elements,  we  have  learnt  to  know  that  the  unity  of 
organism  does  not  mean  a  mysterious  vital  entity,  of  quite 
special  and  superior  nature,  non-material,  hidden  in  the 
secret  centre  of  things,  and  holding  the  parts  together  by  a 
powerful  spiritual  grip,  but  that  it  is  the  expression  of  the 
complete  consensus  or  harmony  of  the  many  and  divers  parts 
arranged  in  that  organic  form.  Apart  from  all  question  of 
mental  unity,  there  can  be  no  question  of  the  existence  of  a 
sufficient  bodily  unity. 

There  is  in  regard  to  the  bodily  organism  a  further 
consideration  which  is  not  alwaj^s  adequately  realised — 
namely,  that  it  is  a  self-adjusting  and  self-registering  struc- 
ture ;  the  modifications  which  it  undergoes  through  exercise 
passing   not   away  without    after-efiects   in  it,   but    being 


20  WILL  IN   ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

embodied  in  the  structure  and  made  part  of  its  nature,  so 
that  they  enter  into  its  life  and  function  ever  afterwards.  Its 
life-principle  is  indeed  a  principle  of  continuity  :  in  the 
living  present  the  incorporate  past  is  active.  The  organic 
registration  affords  an  instructive  instance  of  the  opera- 
tion of  the  law  of  conservation  of  energy  in  the  fashioning 
of  -will ;  for  we  perceive  that  in  an  act  of  will,  which 
always  renders  a  next  like  act  of  will  easier,  not  all  the 
energy  is  expended  in  the  outward  effects  that  it  accom- 
plishes, but  some  of  it  goes  to  lay  in  structure  the  foundation 
of  future  will.  So  it  is  that  will  remembers  and  learns  to 
will,  exercise  building  up  faculty,  and  conduct  character; 
and  that  it  becomes,  accoi'ding  to  its  training,  either  the 
calm  agent  of  strength,  or  the  shifty  accomplice  of  weakness. 

It  is  in  this  organic  registration,  too,  that  we  discover 
the  physical  basis  of  all  memory.  Memory  being  the  recur- 
rence of  a  mental  state  means  physiologically  the  same  part 
of  brain  in  activity  as  on  the  former  occasion.  But  that 
is  not  all,  since  there  is  in  addition  to  the  recurrence  the 
consciousness  that  it  is  a  recurrence — a  reminiscence  :  it 
might  recur  without  such  consciousness,  as  it  does  in  certain 
morbid  states  sometimes,  and  it  would  not  then  be  mental 
memory.  Now  the  physiological  considerations  that  bear 
upon  this  recurrence  are  these  : — first,  the  before-mentioned 
organic  after-effect  of  the  first  function  whereby  it  occurs 
the  second  time  more  easily;  secondly,  that  although  the 
same  part  of  the  brain  is  in  action  as  before,  it  is  the  same 
part  with  the  difference  that  it  has  been  in  action  before, 
and  has  ingrained  record  thereof;  wherefore  the  declaration 
which  this  after-effect  makes  of  itself  in  consciousness  must 
be  something  added  to  the  first  consciousness — that  is  to 
say,  will  be  the  consciousness  of  the  recurrence ;  thirdly, 
that  in  every  part  and  function  of  the  organism  the  whole 
works  consentient,  and  that  such  fundamental  unity  cannot 
fail  to  make,  as  all  bodily  states  do,  some  sort  of  declaration 
of  itself  in  consciousness.  And  if  that  declaration  be  not 
an  intuition  of  the  ego,  what  is  it? 

Haying  this  individual  unity  and  continuity  of  physio- 
logical organism,  it  will  not  be  amiss  to  ask  whether  we , 


WHAT   CONSCIOUSNESS  TELLS  US   CONCEKNING  WILL.        21 

have  not  in  it  the  sufl&cient  basis  of  the  unity  and  continuity 
oFvofition,  the  real  and  constant  foundation  of  the  conscious- . 
ness  of  the  ego.  Impossible,  says  the  metaphysician ;  a  con- 
sciousness one  and  continuous  through  aU  differences  and 
successions  of  states,  not  a  totality  of  so  many  separate 
consciousnesses — that  is  what  I  cannot  conceive  as  the 
subjective  aspect  of  the  unity  of  organism.  But  why  not, 
if  the  organism  be,  as  it  plainly  is,  one  and  continuous,  and 
be  not,  as  it  plainly  is  not,  so  many  separate  elements,  any 
one  of  which  can  have  life  at  all  apart  from  it  ?  Let  us  try 
to  understand  the  why  not,  which  is  this  or  something  like 
it :  the  organic  unity,  being  of  material  breeding,  is  not 
self -known  (a  plain  assumption  of  the  whole  question),  does 
not  make  itself  known  within,  is  known  only  from  without 
by  observation  of  sense  ;  but  inasmuch  as  a  unity  is  known 
from  within,  which  it  is  impossible  should  be  the  unity  that 
is  known  by  observation,  the  conclusion  is  inevitable  that  it 
must  be  the  unity  of  an  internal  something,  an  immaterial 
ego.  It  Js  a  purely  internal  intuition  of  unity,  and  although 
there  "is  a  corresponding  external  unity  manifest  enough  to 
others,  that  has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  it.  We  are 
reqiiired  to  reject  the  real  unity  which  we  perceive  and 
know,  and  which  others  perceive  and  know,  and  to  create 
another  unity  to  run  parallel  with  it,  in  order  to  keep 
rigorously  separate  the  domains  of  subjective  and  objective 
observation ;  not  minding  the  while  to  consider  adequately 
how  that  any  present  phenomenon  of  self-consciousness  is 
possible  only  by  reason  of  past  states  of  consciousness  that 
were  exeited  objectively  and  have  been  wrought,  so  to  speak, 
into  the  structure  of  the  mental  organisation.  Why;  not,  it 
is  natural  to  ask,  a  unity  not  of  mind  separately  nor  of  body 
separately,  but  of  mind  and  body,  known  by  the  two  ways 
of  internal  and  external  observation  ?  Why  not,  indeed,  find 
here,  as  we  well  might,  the  concurrence  of  extension  and 
thought,  of  body  and  mind  ? 

Considering  that  it  is  not  good  philosophy  to  multiply 
causes  needlessly  and  to  invent  secret  powers  to  do  that 
which  there  is  an  obvious  and  sufficient  power  at  hand  to 
do,  it  is  clearly  our  duty  to  find  out  what  the  body  can  do 


22  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

by  itself  in  the  "way  of  maintaining  unity  and  continuity, 
without  help  of  an  imposed  intangible  entity  which  may 
after  all  be  sujDcrfluous.  At  any  rate,  until  the  body's  in- 
competency has  been  plainly  demonstrated  by  a  rigorous 
and  exhaustive  preliminary  inquiry  into  its  powers,  and  the 
necessity  of  a  cause  of  an  entirel}'-  new  order  so  proved 
indisputably,  the  hypothesis  of  a  will-entity  to  supplement 
its  deficiencies  cannot  be  accepted  as  a  necessary  inference. 
Rather  may  we  call  it  the  introduction  of  a  cataclysm 
by  way  of  explanation,  and  compare  it  to  the  catastrophic 
explanations  that  used  at  one  time  to  be  fashionable  in 
geolog}-.  That  being  so,  the  analysis  of  the  so-called  direct 
and  positive  testimony  as  to  the  existence  of  a  will-entity 
has  brought  us  to  these  two  results — first,  that  the  testi- 
mony is  not  an  immediate  deliverance,  but  a  mediate 
inference ;  and,  secondly,  that  the  inference  is  not  a  neces- 
sary inference,  since  another  theory  capable  of  accounting 
for  the  facts  is  possible  and  ready  at  hand. 

If  an  intruder  of  an  inquiring  turn  of  mind,  unawed  by 
the  conventional  assumptions  of  metaphysics,  were  to  venture 
into  that  province  of  thought,  fixed  in  resolve  to  question 
freely  and  think  sincerelj^,  he  might  perhaps  be  tempted  to 
call  in  question  the  absolute  value  of  that  intuition  of  unity 
which  self-consciousness  yields,  and  to  dispute  whether  it 
does  bring  us  into  so  immediate  and  certain  a  relation  with 
the  noumenal  ego  as  is  assumed.  From  the  high  meta- 
physical standpoint  he  might  well  argue  that  we  never  can 
know  the  self-in-itself ;  that  pure  abstract  noumenal  mind  is 
as  unknowable  as  pure  abstract  matter  ;  that  the  only  know- 
able  is  mind  in  a  state  of  determination,  that  is,  in  a  par- 
ticular state  ;  that  the  highest  intuition  of  self-consciousness, 
having  that  character,  has  therefore  no  more  authority  than 
any  other  phenomenal  manifestation.  Moreover,  from  the 
same  standpoint  he  might  go  on  to  make  this  reflection  : 
that  the  consciousness  of  unity  and  continuity  is  after  all  no 
more  than  a  condition  or  form  of  thought,  a  category'"  under 
which  we,  by  our  infirmities  or  limitations,  are  bound  to 
think,  just  as  we  are  bound  to  think  under  the  forms  of 
time  and  space.     I  perceive  and  think  the  world  under  the 


WHAT   CONSCIOUSNESS  TELLS  US   CONCERNING   WILL.        23 

conditions  of  my  senses  and  faculties,  which  conditions  are 
the  forms  of  time  and  space  ;  and  thereupon  I  say  that  the 
external  world  exists  in  time  and  space,  making  of  time  and 
space  sorts  of  realities.  They  are  really  not  existences  of 
that  kind  ;  they  are  relations  of  two  terms — the  self  and  the 
not-self.  We  have  behaved  in  a  like  manner  with  regard  to 
continuity  and  unity,  playing  upon  ourselves  the  trick  of 
transforming  a  form  or  condition  of  self-consciousness  into 
a  direct  intuition  ^  into  the  self-hi-itself,  and  so  into  an 
absolute  revelation  of  the  unity  of  pure  mind. 

It  might  be  hard  to  see  an  end  to  the  inquiry  were  we 
once  to  set  diligently  to  work  to  examine  and  to  set  forth 
how  much  innocent  dupery  we  habitually  practise  upon 
ourselves  in  the  region  of  metaphysics.  Being  compelled 
in  so  attenuated  an  atmosphere  to  make  violent  exertions 
in  order  to  sustain  a  flight  at  all,  we  imagine  that  we  are 
making  a  great  advance  when  we  are  whirling  in  a  circle,  or 
are  little  better  than  stationary.  The  term  consciousness  is 
by  no  means  free  from  misleading  vagueness  and  obscurity 
of  application ;  it  being  a  common  practice  to  speak  of  states 
of  consciousness,  as  if  consciousness  had  its  states,  were 
really  an  entity  behind  the  states  and  had  existence  apart 
from  them,  when  it  is  itself  only  a  state  of  something  else, 
whether  that  something  be  soul  or  body ;  not  otherwise  in 
fact  than  as  it  is  the  practice  to  speak  of  the  will  exercising 
its  several  wills,  whereas  it  is  the  man  who  wills  and  there 
is  no  general  will  apart  from  the  particular  will.  There  is 
no  such  existence  as  a  general  or  abstract  consciousness  in 
the  individual ;  it  is  as  imaginary  a  noumenon  as  abstract 
will  or  abstract  force ;  there  are  so  many  particular  con- 
sciousnesses ;  a  general  consciousness  is  merely  a  notion. 
Indeed,  if  there  be  one  thing  in  the  world  which  is  particular 
to  the  individual,  a  special  quality  of  his  which  he  has  no 
better  warrant  to  abstract  from  his  personality  and  to  make 
absolute  than  his  individual  temper  or  individual  gait,  it 
is  consciousness.  We  are  entirely  ignorant  what  are  the 
physical  conditions  of  consciousness,  which  nevertheless  we 
must  admit  to  exist  wherever  mind  works  b}'  brain.  Obeying 
the  necessity  of  having  some  physical  hypothesis,  we  may 


24  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

suppose — and  one  supposition  will  answer  our  purpose  as 
well  as  another  where  any  hypothesis  wants  positive  base — 
that  each  thought  has,  whether  on  the  same  side  or  in  the 
opposite  half  of  the  brain,  its  reflecting  centre — that  is  to  say, 
a  correspondent  or  consentient  centre  in  which  it  is  instantl}' 
repeated  or  reflected  with  more  or  less  completeness  and 
exactness ;  such  reflection  of  it  being  the  condition  of  con- 
sciousness. What  a  gross  absurdity  it  is  at  once  seen  to  be 
to  find  in  the  particular  consciousness  anything  that  trans- 
cends its  antecedents,  anything  supra-individual,  anything 
universal  or  absolute ! 

Resisting  these  easily  made  digressions,  which  at  every 
turn  tempt  us  to  leave  the  main  track  of  the  argument,  let 
us  now  examine  critically  the  second  positive  declaration 
concerning  will  which  consciousness  is  said  to  make — that 
which  is  interpreted  to  mean  that  the  will  is  free.  Is 
consciousness  as  clear  and  competent  a  witness  as  it  is 
thought  to  be  ?  One  thing  is  plain  at  the  outset :  that  it 
only  illumines  directly  the  mental  state  of  the  moment, 
revealing  nothing  of  the  long  train  of  antecedent  states  of 
which  the  present  state  is  the  outcome ;  all  is  dark  beyond 
where  its  light  immediately  falls,  and  it  cannot  testify  any- 
thing concerning  what  is  going  on  outside  the  range  of  its 
illumination,  any  more  than  a  person  in  the  light  can  testify 
concerning  what  is  taking  place  silently  near  him  in  the 
dark.  As  a  great  ocean  wave  might  be  supposed  to  rise  so 
high  as  to  catch  on  its  crest  the  glow  of  the  rising  or  of  the 
setting  sun,  while  the  waves  around  remained  below  the 
level  of  illumination,  so  a  mental  state  rises  above  the 
threshold  of  consciousness  as  the  outcome  of  the  energies  of 
multitudes  of  more  or  less  active  states  that  remain  below 
the  threshold.  Consciousness  makes  known  the  actual 
choice  or  volition,  but  does  not  make  known  the  pre-existent 
order  of  events :  it  does  not  reveal  what  has  taken  place 
and  is  taking  place  in  the  unillumined  region:  it  is  the 
self-revelation  of  the  moment  and  no  more.  But  how  in- 
finitely small  is  that  revelation  compared  with  what  we 
learn  by  observation  and  experience  of  self  and  of  others  and 
by  the  history  of  human  doings  in  all  times  and  in  all  places. 


d 


r 


WHAT   CONSCIOUSNESS  TELLS   US   CONCERNING  WILL.        25 


needs  not  to  be  pointed  out.  The  one  is  the  coruscating  point 
of  a  moment,  the  other  embraces  length  of  time  and  extent  of 
space.  As  the  testimony  of  consciousness  moreover  is  imme- 
diate, that  is  to  say,  is  strictly  the  expression  of  its  present 
state,  it  cannot  by  the  nature  of  the  case  have  direct  regard 
to  any  former  state  of  consciousness ;  otherwise  we  should 
have  to  admit  that  a  present  state  of  consciousness  could  be 
itself  and  a  former  state  of  consciousness  at  the  same 
instant.  If  it  steps  beyond  the  instant,  we  have  no  longer 
to  do  with  the  direct  deliverance  of  itself,  but  with  the 
indirect  evidence  of  memory  of  antecedent  consciousness, 
not  with  introspective  certainty  but  with  retrospective 
fallacy ;  staying  in  the  instant,  how  can  it  help  falling  into 
the  illusion  of  an  undetermined  will  ? 

This  last  reflection,  if  followed  out  to  its  logical  upshot, 
will  be  found  to  reach  far,  since  it  implies  that  a  present 
state  of  consciousness  has  not,  qud  consciousness,  real  con- 
tinuity with  the  consciousness  of  yesterday  or  of  a  year  ago, 
or  of  thirty  years  ago.  The_  continuity  is  not  a  continuity  of 
consciousness  but  a  continuity  of  memory,  the  basis  of  whicli 
Ts  not  consciousness  but  organic  registration.  Now  inasmuch 
as  the  self  of  today  is  very  different  from  the  self  of  thirty 
years  since,  and  as  moreover  the  quality  of  the  present  state 
qi  consciousness,  even  when  it  is  a  recollection,  connotes  and 
witnesses  to  the  present  self,  it  clearly  is  not  the  conscious- 
ness proper  to  the  then  self ;  that  it  is  impossible  to  revive ; 
you  might  as  well  demand  of  an  adult  that  he  should  retread 
the  infantile  steps  which  he  made  in  learning  to  walk.  The 
sober  truth  is  that  there  is  no  abstract  consciousness  with 
the  intuition  of  identity,  no  actual  unity  of  consciousness ; 
there  are  so  many  particular  consciousnesses,  and  the  thread 
of  continuity  running  through  them  is  not  a  conscious  thread 
but  a  continuity  in  that  which  lies  beneath  consciousness. 
We  should  be  in  a  bad  way  if  we  were  compelled  to  base  the 
certainty  of  identity  on  consciousness  alone. 

Before  assenting  to  its  testimony  concerning  an  unde- 
termined will  as  final  and  sufficient,  it  behoves  us  to  inquire 
and  consider  well  what  has  been  going  on  in  the  unillumined 
region.     Now  whoever  will  be   at  the  pains   to  carry  his 


26  WILL  EST  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

volitional  self-inspection  patiently  back  from  the  present 
state  of  consciousness  to  that  state  which  went  before  it, 
and  from  that  again  to  its  antecedent  state,  and  so  back- 
wards along  the  train  of  activity  which  has  issued  in  the 
latest  conscious  outcome,  lighting  up  in  succession  as  well 
as  he  can  each  link  in  the  intr\ca,te  nexus  ot  many-junctioned 
associations,  may  easily  convince  himself  that  he  would  not 
have  a  present  state  of  volition  were  it  not  for  past  states  of 
volition.  Whatever  be  the  nature  of  will,  it  is  certainly  as 
impotent  to  will  without  previous  acts  of  will  as  a  child  is  to 
talk  and  walk  which  has  never  learnt  its  words  and  steps. 
In  order  to  have  liberty  of  will  it  is  necessary  to  have  not 
only  the  absence  of  constraint  so  that  it  may  act  freely,  but 
the  presence  of  capacity  or  power  so  that  it  may  act  at  all ; 
it  is  of  no  use  being  free  to  read  Homer  if  one  does  not 
understand  a  word  of  Greek,  or  to  play  on  the  fiddle  if  one 
cannot  distinguish  one  note  of  music  from  another.  The 
present  volition  contains  the  abstracts  of  many  former  voli- 
tions by  which  it  has  been,  literally  speaking,  informed. 

No  one  who  reflects  adequately  on  the  matter  will  deny 
or  seriously  dispute  that  an  individual's  thinking,  feeling,  and 
acting  as  he  does  at  any  moment  of  his  life  is  the  outcome 
of  his  nature  and  training,  the  expression  of  his  character ; 
that  his  present  being  is  the  organic  development  of  his  past 
being,  the  issue  of  a  pre-existent  order ;  that  he  is  linked  in 
a  chain  of  causation  which  renders  it  impossible  he  should 
ever  transcend  himself.  It  is  a  chain,  too,  which  a  little 
reflection  will  prove  to  reach  an  indefinitely  long  way  back 
in  an  ancestral  past.  As  it  is  evident  enough  that  a  person 
inherits  a  father's,  grandfather's,  or  more  remote  ancestor's 
tricks  of  manner,  of  speech,  of  walk,  of  handwriting,  of 
gesture  and  the  like,  it  may  be  without  the  least  imitation 
on  his  part,  since  the  father  or  grandfather  was  perhaps  dead 
before  he  was  born,  so  it  is  not  less  evident  that  he  inherits 
modes  of  thought  and  feeling  and  will  which,  being  charac- 
teristic of  him  individually,  seem  to  those  who  are  familiar 
with  him  to  be  essentially  spontaneous,  especially  his  own. 
In  the  internal  parts  of  the  body,  as  in  its  external  con- 
figuration, and  especially  in  the  supreme  structure  of  the 


WHAT   CONSCIOUSNESS   TELLS   US   CONCERNING  WILL.        27 

brain  in  which  all  parts,  internal  and  external,  have  repre- 
sentation, direct  or  indirect,  there  are  lines  of  ancestral 
resemblance  which  condition  his  modes  of  thinking,  feeling, 
and  will — all  his  modes  of  consciousness.  When  he  has  had 
the  inspiration  to  do  well  in  some  sudden  and  ui-gent 
emergency  of  life,  in  which  he  hardly  knew  at  the  time  what 
he  did,  he  might  justly  give  thanks  to  the  dead  father  or 
grandfather  who  endowed  him  with  the  actuating  impulse 
or  the  happy  aptitude  which  served  him  so  well  on  the 
critical  occasion.  Thou  didst  not  behave  like  a  fool  in  that 
overwhelming  emergency  ?  Claim  no  merit  thyself  in  the 
matter,  but  render  deep  and  silent  thanks  to  the  giver.  The 
circumstances  of  the  particular  crisis,  the  bodily  change 
incident  to  an  epoch  of  life,  the  novel  stimulus  of  a  fever  or 
other  bodily  disease,  or  some  occult  cause  of  which  we  can 
give  no  account,  will  kindle  into  activity  an  ancestral  quality 
that  had  been  latent  till  then,  unnoticed  and  perhaps  un- 
suspected. What  man  is  there  who  does  not,  in  his  manner 
of  making  love  to  his  mistress,  show  some  trait  of  character 
and  behaviour  which  he  never  noticed  in  himself  before,  but 
which  he  might  perhaps  have  noticed  in  his  father  had  he 
been  present  at  his  father's  wooing. 

It  must  seem  strange  to  those  who  view  mind  from  a 
pure  psycbological  standpoint  that  such  ancestral  aptitudes 
should  exist  in  it  for  a  long  time  in  a  perfectly  silent  or 
latent  state,  without  the  least  consciousness  on  its  part  of 
their  existence,  and  start  suddenly  into  activity  on  the  occa- 
sion of  some  unforeseen  stimulus.  Where  are  they  during 
all  that  time  of  latency  ?  If  in  the  mind,  how  is  it  that  the 
mind  does  not  comprehend  its  own  contents  ?  It  will  not 
help  to  say  that  they  are  in  the  memory,  for  how  can  the 
memory  contain  that  which,  never  having  been  personally 
known,  has  never  been  put  into  it  ?  Is  it  that  we  must 
admit  unconscious  mind  ;  and  if  so,  what  is  its  relation,  on 
the  one  hand,  to  conscious  mind,  and,  on  the  other,  to  the 
physical  organisation  of  mind  ?  Is  brain,  after  all,  uncon- 
scious mind?  The  fact,  however,  is  quite  consistent  with 
the  experience  of  one  who  is  hugely  pleased  with  some 
brilliant  conception  or  expression  that  occurs  to  him,  and 


28  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

wliich  he  believes  to  be  entirely  original,  when  tbe  real  truth 
is  that  he  met  with  it  in  some  author  years  before,  stored  it 
unawares  in  a  recess  of  his  mind,  and  now  brings  it  forth  in 
all  the  freshness  of  novelty  as  a  new  birth  of  thought.  He 
meanwhile,  happy  parent,  cackles  over  it  with  delight,  like 
a  hen  that  has  just  laid  its  egg,  or  is  as  proud  and  pleased 
as  a  woman  who  has  just  accomplished  the  nowise  original 
or  uncommon  business  of  bringing  a  child  into  the  world. 
Such  the  naive  joy  of  production  everywhere  in  nature  ! 

Here,  then,  is  another  instance  of  mental  being  that  is 
ignorant  of  its  being  ;  an  instance  not  easy  to  explain  on  the 
pure  spiritual  theory  of  mind.  It  is  plain  proof  at  any  rate 
of  the  incompetence  of  self-consciousness  to  perform  a  com- 
plete mental  self-inspection.  Nor  would  it  be  right  to 
ignore  such  unconscious  mental  being  on  the  ground  of  an 
assumed  non-intervention  of  it  in  conscious  life,  seeing  that, 
though  latent,  it  is  not  entirely  passive ;  for  besides  its  deep, 
silent,  but  effective  work  in  moulding  the  mental  nature,  and 
weighting  the  expression  of  it  in  speech  and  conduct,  im- 
pulses from  its  depths  spring  into  consciousness  unawares 
oftentimes,  we  know  not  how  or  why.  Now  and  then  in 
everybody's  life  it  happens  that  an  unforeseen  impulse 
starting  forth  from  the  unconscious  depths  of  his  being 
drives  him  to  say  or  do  what  he  had  not  the  least  intention 
to  say  or  do  a  moment  beforehand,  or  in  like  manner  with- 
holds him  from  doing  what  he  had  full  reasons  and  motives 
to  do.  It  is  not  improbable  that  the  singular  daemon  of 
Socrates  was  an  impulse  of  that  nature,  unmotived  in  con- 
sciousness but  not  so  in  the  character  ;  a  kind  of  inspiration 
apt  naturally  to  spring  up  in  a  richly  endowed,  much-medita- 
tive mind  that  was  habitually  exercised  in  observation  and 
reflection.  So  also  may  it  have  been  with  those  fine  ideas  or 
intuitions  of  Plato,  which  came  into  his  mind  in  so  unforeseen 
and  startling  a  way  that  he  imagined  them  to  be  reminis- 
cences of  a  former  higher  existence.  How  is  it  that  when 
two  persons  give  the  same  opinion  or  counsel  in  almost  the 
same  words  in  the  same  circumstances  the  effect  is  some- 
times so  different?  Is  it  not  because  there  is  the  weight 
of  character  behind  speech,  the  depth  of  inarticulate  nature 


WHAT  CONSCIOUSNESS  TELLS  US  CONCEKNING  WILL.        29 

beneath  the  partial  and  inadequate  art  of  expression  ?  The 
total  energy  in  each  case  is,  if  I  may  so  express  myself,  the 
sum  of  the  potential  and  kinetic  energies  of  the  individual. 
A  great  character,  like  a  great  work  of  art,  moves  men  not 
so  much  by  that  which  he  expresses  as  by  what  that  which 
he  expresses  suggests.  It  is  a  very  poor  definition,  then,  of 
the  ego  to  make  it,  as  some  do,  the  sum  of  agreeable  or 
painful  sensations,  actual  or  ideal,  which  determine  the  con- 
duct ;  when  there  is  not  a  state  of  consciousness,  as  known  to 
self  or  as  revealed  through  its  proper  channels  to  others, 
that  has  not  the  whole  character,  mental  and  bodily, 
beneath  it. 

When  we  reflect  how  much  time  and  what  a  multitude  of 
divers  experiences  have  gone  to  the  formation  of  a  character, 
what  a  complex  product  it  is,  and  what  an  inconceivably  in- 
tricate inter- working  of  intimate  energies,  active  and  inhi- 
bitive,  any  display  of  it  in  feeling  and  will  means,  it  must 
appear  a  gross  absurdity  for  any  one  to  aspire  to  estimate 
and  appraise  all  the  component  motives  of  a  particular  act 
of  will.  Its  sources  are  too  remote  and  hidden,  the  paths 
of  motives  are  too  fine,  intricate,  circuitous  and  various,  to 
admit  a  complete  analysis  of  its  constituent  parts  :  the  keen- 
est self-inspection  in  the  world  can  never  make  them  plain, 
since  it  is  not  possible  to  seize  and  measure  each  minute  and 
remote  operative  thrill  of  energy,  to  bring  all  the  coefficient 
factors  into  the  light  of  consciousness.  As  well  think  to  fix 
and  measure  the  force  of  every  little  wave  that  goes  to  swell 
the  great  tidal  wave  that  dashes  finally  upon  the  shore,  or — a 
less  complex  but  perhaps  juster  comparison — to  measure  the 
numerous  and  exquisitely  fine  and  delicate  thrills  of  motion 
that  make  the  varying  modulations  of  the  human  voice. 
To  dissect  any  act  of  will  accurately,  and  then  to  recom- 
pose  it,  would  be  to  dissect  and  recompose  humanity.  Acts 
of  will  being  acts  and  manifestations  of  self,  outcomes  of 
the  person's  essential  nature,  a  thorough  self-knowledge  is 
now,  as  it  ever  has  been,  an  unattainable  aim  of  knowledge. 
To  affirm  that  will  is  ever  undetermined  is  then  to  postulate 
an  omniscience  of  self  in  face  of  the  certitude  that  not  one- 
self only  but  every  self  is  inscrutably  complex.   Nevertheless, 


30  WILL  IN   ITS  METAPHYSICiL  ASPECT. 

the  pliilosopbers  wlio   refuse  to  acknowledge  the  incompe- 
tence of  self-consciousness  must  continue  to  do  it. 

It  is  in  the  natural  order  of  the  development  of  the 
mental  organisation,  indeed  a  daily  experience  of  it,  that 
energy  becomes  element,  so  to  speak,  the  conscious  motives 
of  past  years  being  thus  incoi-porated  structurally  as  un- 
conscious factors  in  the  motives  of  today :  there  is  the 
materialisation  of  motives  as  the  basis  of  future  function, 
the  structuralisation  of  simple  function  as  the  step  of  an 
n.dvance  to  a  higher  function.  We  can  no  more  bring  back 
the  motives  to  consciousness  in  their  primitive  characters 
than  we  can  bring  back  the  life-functioii  of  a  leaf  which  is 
embodied  in  the  structure  of  the  branch  on  which  it  grew  ; 
or  than  we  can,  in  our  instantaneous  visual  judgments  of 
size,  distance  and  the  like,  rehearse  in  full  detail  the  slow 
and  tedious  stej)s,  now  incorporate  in  structure  as  habit  or 
instinct,  by  which  they  were  originally  acquired. 

The  progress  of  intellectual  growth  is  a  progress  from 
the  concrete  and  simple  to  the  general  and  abstract — from 
the  feeling  to  the  image,  from  the  image  to  the  idea,  from 
the  simple  idea  to  the  complex  idea,  from  complex  ideas 
to  abstract  conceptions ;  thereupon  the  general  or  abstract 
tenn  becomes  the  sign  of  a  class  of  perceptions  or  concep- 
tions, is  used  as  a  convenient  representative  unit  or  sub- 
stitute for  them,  like  an  algebraic  symbol,  and  functions  as 
such  in  subsequent  mental  operations ;  and  this  substitu- 
tion of  substitutes  in  ascending  abstractions  goes  on  as  far 
as  our  minds  are  able  to  go  in  that  direction.  One  may 
easily  imagine,  as  correspondent  on  the  physical  side,  so  many 
superimposed  layers  of  cerebral  structure  successively  or- 
ganised in  function,  higher  centres  being  brought  into  play 
to  co-ordinate  lower  centres — superordinate  to  them  subordi- 
nate— and  the  whole  together  forming  the  mental  organisation 
or  the  texture  of  mind,  so  to  speak.  When  we  wish  to  know 
the  true  meaning  of  the  abstract,  to  test  rigorously  what  it 
actually  represents,  we  must  always  go  back  to  the  concrete  ; 
and  when  we  do  that  we  find  that  in  the  last  resort  it  repre- 
sents the  mode  of  affection  of  an  individual  by  an  object  or 
a  class  of  objects  and  his  special  mode  of  reaction  to  the 


WHAT   CONSCIOUSNESS  TELLS  US  CONCERNING  WILL.        31 

object.  That  is  his  apprehension  of  it,  which  apprehension 
or  mental  grasping,  be  it  noted,  includes  movement  as  a  con- 
stituent element ;  is  not,  as  commonly  implied,  receptive  only, 
but  is  also  reactive — a  bi-polar  event,  sensory  and  motor. 

Little  as  we  think  of  it,  th^  discriminations  of  sense, 
whether  of  sight  or  of  touch  or  of  any  other  sense,  imply 

^  /  movements  of  muscles,  without  which  they  would  be  impos- 

^  siblej  all  the  impressions  which  it  is  capable  of  receiving 
might  be  made  on  each  sense  without  any  discriminative 
perceptions  on  its  part,  in  the  absence  of  the  proper  motor 
adaptations  by  the  muscles  connected  with  its  organ.  Indeed, 
without  muscular  action  it  may  be  questioned  whether  we 
y      should  feel  at  all.     In  the  first  instance,  the  impression  upon 

/ ^^  the  sense  produces  a  disturbance  of  equilibrium  which  dis- \/ 

charges  itself  in  vague  motor  reactions  on  the  external  world;  ' 
but  these  motor  reactions  become  by  degrees  special  and 
ada.ptive.  Now  mental  development  in  man  does  not  stay  at 
this  sensori- motor  level ;  for  the  adaptive  reactions  are  duly 
represented  or  registered  in  the  higher  centres  of  the  brain, 
and  thereafter  are  not  expressed  externally  in  visible  move- 
ments, but  take  place  internally  in  their  cerebral  representa- 
tions, such  internal  operations  being  what  we  call  perceptions 
or  ideas.  Thus  ideas  signify  fundamentally  adaptive  reactions 
at  one  remove  ;  complex  ideas  combinations  of  such  repre- 
sentative reactions ;  and  abstract  ideas  cerebral  representa- 
tions at  still  higher  removes.  The  understanding  of  an 
abstract  term,  or  each  operation  of  our  highest  reason,  im- 
plies then  a  deep  fund  of  slow  acquisition  by  culture  and 
exercise,  not  fundamentally  different  from,  though  vastly 
more  delicate  and  complex  than,  the  faculty  of  performing 
some  skilful  bodily  movement  which  has  been  gained  by 
diligent  practice  :  as  impossible  to  the  undeveloped  and  feeble 
intelligence  of  a  low  savage  as  the  cleverest  feat  of  a  juggler  ^40"^^ 
is  to  an  untrained  child.  The  commonest  operations  of  in-  Iv^^ 
/    telligence  postulate  a  succession  of  functions  that  have  been 

^       capitalised  in  structure  as  faculty. 

A  very  rich  fund  of  faculty  is  of  necessity  presupposed 
when  will  is  influenced  by  reason  in  the  moral  sphere,  and  so 
acts  in  its  highest  capacity;  for  the  supreme  reason  which 


>o^ 


32  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

then  inspires  it  is  not  any  simple,  pure,  spiritual  entity  that 
requires  no  support  in  experience,  but  it  is  the  highest  and 
most  refined  outcome  of  enlightened  experience ;  something 
which  comes  not  miraculously  into  a  man  but  grows  in  him 
by  consummate  development  from  the  not  supreme,  and  is  no 
more  possible  without  it  than  the  flower  is  possible  without 
the  plant.  To  know  the  real  value  in  sterling  coin  of  the  fin§ 
theoretical  talk  about  the  declarations  of  supreme  reason  one 
must  bring  them  in  the  last  resort  to  the  test  of  practical 
application.  And  it  is  the  same  with  moral  principles  :  the 
difficulty  in  morals  has  never  been  the  enunciation  of  lofty 
general  principles,  but  the  application  of  the  principle  to  the 
particular  case ;  and  the  eternal  barrenness  of  books  about 
ethics  is  that  they  may  give  us  no  code  of  exact  rules  to 
help  at  this  practical  juncture.  Even  Kant,  sad  to  say, 
sends  us  to  common  utilitarian  standards  for  the  practical 
uses  of  his  grand  categorical  imperative. 

To  search  adequately  into  the  unillumined  region  of  a 
person's  character,  in  order  to  find  out  the  motives  of  his 
conduct  on  every  occasion,  would  manifestly  necessitate  the 
complete  unravelling  of  his  mental  development,  if  it  did  not 
compel  us  to  undertake,  in  historical  retrospect,  an  analytical 
disintegration  of  the  mental  development  of  the  race  from  its 
beginning.  But  a  very  cursory  inspection  of  any  one's 
behaviour  suffices  to  show  that  there  are  many  energies  at 
work  below  the  threshold  of  consciousness,  whenever  an 
energy  rises  above  it  as  a  conscious  state.  Hence  come  the 
gross  and  ludicrous  illusions  into  which  men  oftentimes  fall 
with  regard  to  their  motives  on  particular  occasions,  the  subtile 
ways  in  which  they  innocently  dupe  themselves,  the  signal 
self-deceptions  of  which  they  are  sincerely  capable.  An 
actively  conscious  state  attracts  to  itself  reinforcing  energies 
of  consonant  vibrations  from  the  infraconscious  depths  of 
the  character,  grouping  around  it  the  ideas  and  feelings  that 
are  of  a  sympathetic  nature,  and  thus,  once  cherished, 
obtains  an  abundance  of  congenial  support,  and  easily  feels 
itself  amply  justified. 

A  person  is  persuaded  that  he  has  acted  in  full  freedom 
of  will  from  certain  high  motives  of  which  he  was  conscious, 


WHAT   CONSCIOUSNESS  TELLS  US   CONCEEKING  WILL       33 

when  these,  after  all,  were  not  the  real  motives  that  actuated 
him,  and  when  even  a  wayfaring  man,  though  a  fool,  may 
perceive  plainly  that  they  were  not.  How  is  it  that  friends 
of  humanity  are  often  the  enemies  of  their  homes,  and  that 
undetected  wife-poisoners  make  zealous  professional  philan- 
thropists ?  J  am  not  sure  whether  one  person  who  lived  in 
the  society  of  another  for  a  month,  in  circumstances  fitted 
to  strain  and  test  his  qualities,  though  he  might  not  be  a 
particularly  acute  observer  himself,  would  not  know  more  of 
the  other's  real  character  than  the  latter  would  know  of  it 
himself  after  years  of  toilsome  introspection  and  scrupulous 
self-analysis.  Certainly  we  may  get  a  truer  explanation 
sometimes  of  a  person's  conduct  on  a  particular  occasion  by 
a  knowledge  of  the  characters  of  his  near  relations  than  by 
his  exposition  of  his  motives  or  one's  own  divination  of 
them  ;  for  in  the  traits  of  their  character  we  may  see  in  full 
developmcTit,  written  out,  as  it  were,  in  plain  characters,  that 
which  is  potential  mainly  and  of  occasional  outcome  in  him. 
'Tis  a  philosophic  use  to  make  of  relations  to  use  them  to 
teach  self-knowledge. 

When  acts  appear  to  be  incommensurate  with  motives, 
as  they  sometimes  do,  or  when  the  same  motive  appears  to 
produce  different  acts,  the  just  conclusion  is  not  that  an 
arbitrary  power  has  intervened  capriciously  and  upset 
calculation;  but  that  the  motives  which  show  themselves 
in  the  light  of  reflection  are  only  a  part  of  the  complex 
causation,  and  that  the  most  important  part  thereof  lies 
in  the  dark.  When  the  same  motive  acts  differently  in 
different  persons  or  in  the  same  person  at  different  times — 
when,  for  example,  one  sacrifices  wealth,  repose,  reputation, 
even  life  itself,  for  a  motive  which  scarce  touches  another ; 
or  when  one  man  is  moved  to  the  depths  of  his  being  by  the 
glance  of  a  woman  which  has  no  more  effect  upon  another, 
or  perhaps  upon  himself  at  another  time,  than  upon  a  statue 
of  marble — it  is  ridiculous  to  speak  of  the  motive  being  the 
same  :  the  so-called  motive  is  hardly  more  than  the  occasion 
of  the  unloosing  of  the  real  intimate  motives  that  are 
immanent  in  the  structure  of  the  character.  If  the  ego 
represents  the  consensus  of  the  several  parts  of  the  organism. 


34  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

it  is  plain  that  disorder  of  any  part  will  affect  directly  the 
consensus,  and  so  indirectly  the  disposition  of  the  ego^  which 
must  needs  thereupon  react  differently  to  a  stimulus  from 
what  it  woidd  have  done  had  its  temper  not  been  so  modified. 
A  face  that  provokes  instant  aversion  in  one  person  may 
^tir  as  instant  a  liking  in  another,  because  its  features  are 
signs  that  appeal  by  a  subtile  eloquence  to  antipathic  or 
sympathetic  qualities  in  the  beholder's  nature  ;  the  like- 
kindedness  or  unlike-kindedness  of  nature  being  itself 
perhaps  the  result  of  the  embodiment  of  intimate  ancestral 
relations  between  persons  of  similar  character  and  phy- 
siognomy. Would  you  learn  best  what  a  person's  motives 
have  been,  what  is  the  real  worth  of  the  freedom  of  will 
that  he  has  enjoyed,  study  the  history  of  his  life ;  that  is 
his  character,  and  there  you  will  find  the  unequivocal  record 
of  what  he  has  willed. 

It  is  of  the  first  importance,  when  discussing  the  de- 
termination of  will  by  motive,  to  apprehend  clearly  that 
motive  and  cause  are  not  the  same  things,  and  to  take  diligent 
heed  not  to  confound  them.  The  motive  ma}'  be  little, 
seemingly  quite  trifling,  and  the  effect  something  vastly  out 
of  proportion  to  it,  for  the  motive  is  the  slight  touch  which 
liberates  the  pent-up  forces,  the  sum  of  which  and  of 
conscious  motives  together  constitutes  the  cause.  That  a 
little  thing  will  produce  a  great  effect  when  the  mechanism 
is  accurately  framed  and  fitted  to  respond  to  it,  we  know  as 
well  by  the  easy  starting  of  a  locomotive  as  by  the  violent 
sneezing  which  a  grain  of  snuff  in  the  nostril  will  occasion ; 
when  cutting  or  tearing  the  mucous  membrane  of  it  would 
have  no  such  effect.  In  like  manner,  by  touching  a  button 
with  the  little  finger,  or  by  giving  a  sharp  tap  to  a  piece  of 
dynamite,  one  might,  if  suitable  preparations  had  been  made 
beforehand,  blow  a  thousand  persons  into  eternity.  The 
touch  or  tap  may  be  the  motive,  but  is  not  the  efficient  cause 
in  that  case  ;  it  is  the  initial  step  of  a  series  of  events  which 
issue  in  the  explosion.  Things  being  disposed  exactly  as 
they  were  in  a  complex  sequence,  the  result  was  a  necessity  j 
but  a  very  trivial  intervention,  disarranging  the  order  of  the 
nicely  adjusted  antecedents,  would  have  sufficed  to  prevent 


WHAT  CONSCIOUSNESS  TELLS  US  CONCEKNING  WILL.       35 

the  explosion.  So  in  some  sort  it  is  with  will,  which  in 
every  case  is  a  most  complex  involution  of  energies ;  the 
motive  which  occasions  the  discharge  is  not  the  cause,  it  is 
one  of  the  many  co-operating  conditions  the  sum  of  which  is 
cause.  On  what  seemingly  trivial  things — the  purest  hazard 
or  the  meanest  incident — have  the  great  movements  of  the 
world  sometimes  hinged?  Had  Cleopatra's  nose  heen  a  little 
shorter,  says  Pascal,  the  whole  face  of  the  earth  would  have 
been  changed. 

What  an  awful  and  overwhelming  reflection  this  of  the 
momentous  issue  of  trifling  motive,  when  made  in  refer- 
ence to  individual  life,  if  one  really  possessed  freewill!  A 
minute  omission,  a  trivial  commission  at  a  critical  juncture, 
which  a  little  sharper  foresight  or  a  little  more  resolution 
might  have  avoided,  has  turned  the  whole  current  of  a  life. 
One  would  be  driven  to  take  refuge  in  fatality  in  order  to 
escape  a  crushing  weight  of  despair,  if  a  single  wrong  choice, 
an  accidental  inclination  this  way  or  that,  could  have  such 
momentous  issues,  so  awful  the  responsibility  otherwise.  Be 
comforted :  you  are  at  the  mercy  of  no  such  accidents ;  the 
trivial  incident  was  but  the  occasion  of  the  internal  explo- 
sion, so  to  speak,  and  without  it  or  under  the  impact  of 
some  other  equally  light  motive  the  individual  nature  would 
have  declared  itself  and  had  its  way.  The  will  is  not  deter- 
mined by  motive  but  by  cause — that  is  to  say,  by  the  sum 
of  conditions,  passive  and  active,  on  which  the  event  follows ; 
in  other  words,  it  has  as  antecedents,  not  only  the  motives 
of  which  we  are  conscious,  but  the  motive  energies  that  are 
active  below  the  threshold  of  consciousness. 

It  is  easy  to  see  how,  in  the  absence  of  any  knowledge  of 
these  infraconscious  energies,  men  might  fall  into  the  opinion 
of  a  freewill;  for  when  the  will  acted  without  apparent 
motives,  and  more  particularly  when  its  action  was  not  in 
accord  with  the  apparently  prevailing  motives,  it  was  the 
most  natural  thing  in  the  world  to  ascribe  the  impulse  to 
caprice,  freedom,  something  self-determining  in  it.  Behold- 
ing with  surprise  the  very  different  volitions  of  the  same 
person  in  the  same  circumstances,  and  reflecting  on  the 
similar  experiences  of  self — a  seeming  identity  of  antecedents 


36  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

■with  a  manifest  diversity  of  consequents — it  was  an  obvious 
question  how  the  individual  could  form  so  different  a  judg- 
ment and  exercise  so  different  a  will  were  the  will  not  free. 
The  answer  of  course  is  that  he  was  not  the  same  person 
and  had  not  the  same  will ;  any  more  than  he  is  the  same 
person  and  has  the  same  will  at  puberty  as  in  childhood,  in 
manhood  as  at  puberty,  in  old  age  as  in  manhood,  in  the 
hour  of  death  as  on  the  day  of  his  marriage.  Here,  too, 
comes  plainly  out  the  justice  of  the  argument  on  which 
stress  has  been  laid  by  sober-minded  writers  on  philosophy 
— that  the  right  and  proper  opposite  of  necessary  is  not/ree, 
but  fortuitous  or  contingent ;  the  contingency  or  chance 
lying  not  in  the  absence  of  determination  but  in  the  presence 
of  unknown  determinants. 

At  this  point,  then,  I  hope  to  have  said  enough  to  estab- 
lish my  second  proposition,  and,  having  first  proved  to  the 
metaphysician  that  consciousness  does  not  tell  him  that  he 
has  such  a  will  as  he  imagines,  to  have  now  proved  that  it 
has  not  the  authority  to  tell  him  that  his  will  is  undeter- 
mined. He  has  based  upon  its  declaration  a  superstructure 
which  it  is  unable  to  bear.  Be  the  doctrine  of  an  undeter- 
mined entity  true  or  not,  consciousness  is  not  competent  to 
decide  the  question  by  an  immediate  intuition.  It  will  not 
be  amiss  to  go  on  now  to  make  a  further  examination  of  the 
nature  and  conditions  of  the  authority  of  consciousness. 


SECTION  III. 

CONCEENING   THE   AUTHORITY   OF   CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Is  there  not  large  assumption,  and  perhaps  a  good  deal 
of  fallacy  in  the  large  assumption,  made  on  behalf  of  the 
authority  of  its  self- intuitions  ?  Let  the  inquiry  be  sincere 
and  searching,  and  it  will  disclose  reasons  to  suspect  some- 
thing illusory  in  the  assertion  that  the  knowledge  of  mental 
states  through  self-consciousness  is  more  certain  and  positive, 
because  more  immediate,  than  the  knowledge  of  external 


CONCEENING    THE  AUTHOEITY  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS,        37 

objects  througli  the  senses.  The  latter  knowledge  is  after 
all  just  as  immediate  in  itself,  since  it  consists  actually  of 
states  of  consciousness. 

When  I  perceive  an  object  it  manifestly  is  not  the 
object  that  is  known  to  me  directly,  but  the  state  of  con- 
sciousness: the  odour  is  not  in  the  rose,  but  in  the  rose- 
smeller  ;  the  colour  is  not  in  the  flower,  but  in  the  flower- 
seer  ;  the  harmony  of  fine  sound  is  not  in  the  instrument, 
but  in  the  sensibilities  of  him  who  hears  it,  existing  not 
for  him  who  has  no  ear  for  music  :  the  external  conditions  of 
colour,  odour  and  sound  are  not  in  the  least  like  the 
sensations  which  they  excite.  Whatever  it  be  mediate  of, 
however,  the  state  of  consciousness  is  itself  immediate. 
In  like  manner,  the  knowledge  of  those  states  of  conscious- 
ness which  are  described  as  immediate — the  Descartian 
cogito,  for  example,  which  is  to  convince  me  that  I  am — is 
without  doubt  immediate  in  itself,  but  it  is  none  the  less 
mediate  of  something  of  which  it  is  an  affection ;  and 
this  something,  if  we  suppose  it  to  be  a  mental  self,  is  far 
more  difficult  to  know  in  itself  than  the  external  object, 
being  no  more  than  it  within  the  compass  of  introspective 
intuition,  and,  unlike  it,  not  being  within  the  compass  of 
objective  observation.  A  state  of  consciousness  that  is  at 
all  definite,  whether  of  internal  or  external  origin,  cannot 
certainly  be  either  the  subjective  or  the  objective  thing  in 
itself :  it^  is  a  relation  of  self  and  not- self,  and  implicates 
the  one  as  necessarily  as  the  other  term.  Cogito,  ergo  sum, 
*  I  think,  therefore  I  am,'  has  a  ring  of  transcendental  author- 
ity, until  we  interpolate  after  '  I '  the  quietly  suppressed  but 
none  the  less  surreptitiously  understood  '  who  am,'  and  let 
it  read,  as  it  should  read,  thus — '  I  [who  am]  think,  there- 
fore I  am ;  *  after  which  it  does  not  appear  to  carry  us 
beyond  the  simple  and  subjectively  irreducible  fact  of  con- 
sciousness, beneath  which,  it  must  not  be  forgotten,  there  is 
in  all  cases  the  more  fundamental  fact  of  an  organism  that 
is  one. 

To  assert  that  the  feeling  of  which  we  have  direct  ex- 
perience is  not  bodily  but  mental,  is  to  make  two  statements  j,      ^ 
which  are  not  self-evident,  and  which  certainly  cannot  be 


38  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

proved ;  for,  in  the  first  place,  we  liave  no  means  of  knowing 
that  it  is  not  bodily,  since  rt  has  never  yet  been  shown, 
though  it  is  freely  assumed,  that  consciousness  is  not  the 
function  of  a  particular  bodily  structure ;  and,  in  the  second 
place,  we  have  no  means  of  knowing  that  it  is  mental,  or  at 
any  rate  we  do  not  know  that  in  affirming  it  to  be  mental  we 
mean  anything  more  than  that  it  is  sui  generis— th&t  is  to 
say,  an  experience  distinctly  different  from  that  which  we  get 
by  any  other  channel  of  knowledge  of  what  bodily  function  is. 
Mental  in  that  sense,  and  special  in  any  sense,  it  certainly 
is,  but  the  question  really  is  whether  the  special  result  be 
due  to  the  special  channel  through  which  the  information 
comes,  or  to  the  existence  of  a  special  entity ;  to  our  mode 
of  apprehension,  or  to  the  secret  presence,  in  the  back- 
ground, of  a  substance  which  is  not  substance,  being  insub- 
stantial— immaterial  substance.  Here,  again,  we  strike 
upon  one  of  those  expressions  that  seem  to  common  appre- 
hension to  be  a  contradiction  in  terms  and  a  mode  of  robbing 
language  of  definite  meaning,  but  which  the  mystical  sense 
of  high  philosophy  perceives  to  be  a  conjunction  of  opposites 
that  bespeaks  a  deeper  unity. 

We  may  acknowledge  readily  that  the  direct  experience 
of  consciousness  is  quite  unlike  our  experience  of  any  other 
bodily  function,  and  ought  to  be  described  in  different 
language,  but  it  follows  not  therefrom  that  it  is  not  bodily 
experience.  Metaphysics  will  remain  in  any  event  a  special 
study ;  not  perhaps  as  the  study  by  a  physical  being  of 
something  that  has  no  essential  relation  to  physics,  since 
physics  plainly  lies  beneath  psychics,  but  as  an  aspect  of 
physics  known  by  another  channel  than  any  of  the  ordinary 
sense-channels  by  which  we  know  physics — something  which 
in  that  sense  is  truly  beyond  physics  {/j^sto,  to,  <f)v<Ti,Kd). 
It  is  impossible  to  describe  a  sound  in  terms  of  sight,  or  a 
sight  in  terms  of  smell,  or  a  touch  in  terms  of  taste ;  a  green 
sound  or  a  blue  smell  or  a  bitter  light  would  not  be  thought 
by  sane  men  to  be  terms  of  much  meaning ;  but  these 
different  senses  may  all  be  affected  by  one  and  the  same 
object  through  its  different  properties,  and  they  are  all 
functions  of  one  and  the  same  body.     It  is  protested  loudly 


CONCERNING  THE  AUTHORITY  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.        39 

enougli  that  movement  cannot  explain  tliouglit ;  and  it 
certainly  is  impossible  to  think  the  transformation  of  that 
which  we  perceive  objectively  as  movement  into  that  which 
we  are  conscious  of  subjectively  as  thought :  to  say  so  is 
equivalent  to  saying  that  light  cannot  be  heard,  nor  sound 
seen,  nor  one  mode  of  perception  ever  be  another  mode  of 
perception.  But  if  any  one  could  conceive  himself  capable 
of  perceiving  movement  subjectively — that  is,  by  self-con- 
sciousness, and  of  perceiving  thought  objectively — that  is, 
through  the  senses,  the  reconciliation  might  not  be  incon- 
ceivable; in  that  case  metaphysics,  objectively  studied, 
would  be  the  physics  of  mind,  and  physics,  subjectively 
studied,  would  be  the  metaphysics  of  matter. 

We  do  not  insist  upon  keeping  rigorously  apart,  because 
each  is  special,  the  respective  testimonies  of  the  several 
senses ;  on  the  contrary,  we  justly  insist  on  bringing  them 
together,  comparing  and  combining  them  so  as  to  get  the 
fullest  information  we  can  about  the  object  by  which  they 
are  severally  affected  ;  we  will  have  the  concordant  testimony 
of  two  or  three  witnesses,  or  rather  of  all  the  witnesses  that 
we  can  succeed  in  bringing  into  relation  with  it.  The  con- 
sequence is  that  one  witness  supplements  and  sometimes 
corrects  another,  and  the  evidence  is  strengthened.  When 
I  know  an  orange,  I  know  it  by  what  sight  and  touch  and 
taste  and  smell  have  respectively  told  me  about  it,  my  per- 
ception of  it  being  the  organised  association  of  their  ex- 
periences ;  and  if  one  of  the  witnesses  chances  to  be  mistaken 
the  other  witnesses  come  in  to  supplement  its  deficiencies  or 
to  correct  its  mistakes.  But  it  is  not  so  with  the  internal 
revelations  of  consciousness;  it  works  alone,  independent 
and  self-sufficing ;  and  if  it  chances  to  go  wrong  there  is  no 
one  to  warn  or  to  correct  it.  It  can  never  feel  therefore 
that  it  is  wrong  and  that  it  requires  to  be  supplemented  or 
set  right,  any  more  than  a  particular  sight  or  sound  can  be 
self-corrective ;  indeed,  it  never  is  wrong  in  its  direct  de- 
liverance, since  this  is  purely  the  expression  of  its  state  at 
the  time,  the  direct  statement  of  its  immediate  experience. 
There  is  no  doubt  of  tlie  feeling,  be  it  sound  or  morbid,  and 
that  is  all  that  there  is  no  doubt  about. 


40  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

But  to  lay  hold  of  tliat  indisputable  fact  and  fortb.willi 
to  base  upon  it  tbe  dogma  of  an  infallible  authority  of  con- 
sciousness with,  respect  to  the  worth  of  these  direct  deliver- 
ances, the  value  in  sterling  coin  of  experience  which  they 
represent,  is  a  procedure  that  is  by  no  means  legitimate ; 
they  may  be  sterling  or  they  may  be  trash  ;  it  merely  makes 
them  known,  as  the  sun  illumines  indifferently  mosque  oi' 
mud  hut.  Any  direct  deliverance  of  consciousness  at  any 
moment  is  what  it  is  by  virtue  of  the  manifold  objective  and 
subjective  experiences  of  the  individual,  by  which  has  been 
built  up  by  degrees  the  mind-nature  of  which  it  is  the 
present  outcome ;  and  its  value,  little  or  much,  as  true  or  as 
false  coin,  depends  upon  the  character  of  these  antecedent 
processes.  It  is  vain  pretence  then  to  discover  in  the  intui- 
tion of  consciousness  an  immanent  criterion  of  truthfulness, 
for  whoso  begins  with  the  ego  will  infallibly  end  with  the 
ego  :  the  inward  revelation  must  be  brought  into  comparison 
with  the  knowledge  obtained  through  other  sources  in  order 
to  be  tested  and  approved.  Can  there  be  a  greater  absurdity, 
when  we  think  of  it,  a  more  completely  knowledge-annihi- 
lating device  than  to  pretend  to  keep  provinces  of  knowledge, 
however  acquired,  rigorously  asunder  !  To  assert  liberty  and 
self-sufi&cingness  in  one  science,  and  necessity  and  inter- 
dependence in  all  other  sciences,  is  really  the  negation  of  all 
__science.  It  is  a  gaping  contradiction  in  the  very  foundation 
of  knowledge,  which  renders  any  stable  superstructure  im- 
possible ;  for  how  can  man,  being  one,  have  real  knowledge 
unless  it  is  unity  of  knowledge  ?  How  make  for  himself  a 
synthesis  of  the  world  if  he  is  required  to  preserve  an 
absolute  separation,  an  impassable  chasm,  between  two 
regions  of  knowledge  9 

If  you  would  know  what  is  the  positive  value  of  the 
direct  deliverance  of  an  individual  consciousness,  you  must 
compare  it  with  the  deliverances  of  consciousness  in  other 
persons  ;  it  must  be  supplemented  and  corrected  by  these 
aids  in  the  social  organism,  as  one  sense  is  supplemented  and 
corrected  by  another  sense  in  the  bodily  organism.  My 
subjective  states  are  to  be  appraised  by  another's  objective 
observation  of  them  in  their  modes  of  outward  expression. 


/ 


CONCERNING-  THE   AUTHORITY   OF   CONSCIOUSNESS.         41 

as  his  subjective  states  are  to  be  appraised  by  my  objective 
observation  of  them.  Assuredly  tbey  are  nqtjof  the  least 
value  except  in  their  objective  relations ;  for  however  price- 
less to  him  as  direct  intuitions  of  his  consciousness,  they 
cannot  be  communicated  by  direct  sympathy  to .  another 
person's  self-consciousness.  There  is  a  common  sense  arising 
from  the  uniformities  of  experience  of  similarly  constituted 
beings  in  similar  circumstances  which  corrects  the  vagaries 
of  the  individual,  who  may  have  some  peculiarity  of  constitu- 
tion or  be  affected  by  some  peculiarity  of  circumstance. 
Were  all  people  on  earth  compounded,  framed  and  consti- 
tuted exactly  alike,  and  placed  in  exactly  the  same  circum- 
stances, they  would,  freewill  notwithstanding,  all  feel  exactly 
alike,  think  exactly  alike,  act  exactly  alike ;  it  is  in  fact 
what  they  do  now  in  respect  of  matters  in  which  they  are 
most  nearly  alike — their  sexual  relations,  to  wit.  Similarly 
constituted  mentally  and  having  a  similar  experience,  they 
must  of  necessity  arrive  at  certain  common  truths  ;  just  as, 
their  bodies  being  what  they  are,  they  are  bound  to  develop 
certain  common  bodily  movements.  Scientific  truths  are  no 
more  than  truths  which  any  man  of  sound  intelligence  who 
had  the  adequate  special  experience  and  training  could  not 
help  reaching,  if  he  set  himself  to  work  in  the  proper 
quarter.  The  sciences  are  the  developments  of  common  sense 
j.n  special  directions. 

A  logical  inference,  the  perception  of  a  general  law,  a 
mathematical  demonstration,  the  certainty  of  an  arithmetical 
calculation,  the  confidence  of  each  daily  action  among  men 
and  things,  the  understanding  of  another's  language  and  the 
certainty  that  mine  in  turn  will  be  understood  : — all  these 
appeal,  as  it  were,  to  some  certainty  in  me  which  is  more 
than  myself.  It  is  the  common  mind  of  the  race  in  me, 
wliioli  belongs  to  me  as  one  of  my  kind — the  common  sense 
of  mankind,  if  you  will.  Because  the  kind  is  in  me  and  I 
am  a  living  element  of  it,  I  cannot  help  consciously  or  un- 
consciously appealing  to  and  silently  acknowledging  its  rules 
and  sanctions.  There  is  no  rule  to  distinguish  between  true 
and  false  but  the  common  judgment  of  mankind,  no  rule  to 
distinguish  between  virtue  and  vice  but  the  common  feeling 


42  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

of  mankind.  Wherefore  the  truth  of  one  age  is  the  fable  of 
the  next,  the  virtue  of  one  epoch  or  nation  the  vice  of 
another  epoch  or  nation,  and  the  individual  whose  judgment 
is  deranged  has  his  private  truth-standard  that  is  utterly- 
false.  Common  sense,  which  embodies  that  which  is 
common  in  the  experiences  of  multitudes  of  different 
individuals — that  in  them  which  is  generic  and  essential, 
as  distinguished  from  the  incidental  and  passing — is  there- 
fore more  sensible  than  any  individual  in  all  cases,  save  in 
the  exceptional  case  of  a  pre-eminently  gifted  person  of 
genius  who  has  a  special  insight  and  is  in  advance  of  his 
age ;  to  his  level  must  common  sense  slowly  rise  by  a  gradual 
development  of  such  more  special  sensibilities  and  reactions 
as  he  possesses.  But  even  in  that  rare  case  the  superiority 
is  in  some  special  direction  of  thought  and  action  rather 
than  a  general  pre-eminence ;  it  does  not  embrace  the  re- 
lations of  mankind  all  round,  so  that  it  remains  atrue  saying 
that  no  one  has  so  much  sense  as  the  common  sense  of 
mankind . 

It  has  been  the  custom  to  make  a  mighty  deal  of  the 
difference  between  instinct  and  reason,  the  inclination  always 
being,  from  a  desire  to  exalt  reason,  to  put  a  wider  gap 
between  them  than  actually  exists.  In  regard  to  that 
matter  I  shall  take  leave  to  make  two  propositions  by  way  of 
raising  the  low  and  bringing  down  the  high — first,  that  logic 
is  just  as  mechanical  as  instinct ;  and,  secondly,  that  instinct 
is  virtually  the  stereotyped  common  sense  of  the  species. 
It  is  impossible  for  any  human  being  of  properly  developed 
understanding  who  comprehends  distinctly  the  premises  of  a 
simple  syllogism  to  avoid  arriving  at  the  plain  logical 
conclusion ;  he  is  compelled  to  it  by  as  fatal  a  necessity  as 
any  animal  is  to  obey  its  instinct;  all  the  liberty  of  his 
reason,  if  it  be  sound  reason,  is  to  obey  that  necessity.  Is 
there  any  instinct  more  mechanical  than  that?  In  the  lower 
animals  their  few  simple  wants,  determining  a  few  simple 
relations  with  the  external  world,  are  met  by  certain 
fixed  habits  or  so-called  instincts  of  action,  and  they 
necessarily  make  no  mistake  so  long  as  the  external  rela- 
tions   are    not    changed;    their    instincts    represent    the 


CONCERNING  THE  AUTHORITY   OF   CONSCIOUSNESS.        43 

generalised  and  capitalised  experiences  of  the  kind  in  adap- 
tation to  those  relations  ;  they  are,  as  it  were,  the  embodied 
common  sense  arising  from  the  uniformities  of  experience  of 
similarly  constituted  beings  in  similar  circumstances.  In 
some  of  the  highest  animals  these  primitive  wants  and 
desires  are  also  the  centres  of  a  few  simple  ideas  and  voli- 
tions which  revolve  round  them,  and,  aiding  in  their 
gratification,  are  supplements  to  them ;  but  being  very 
simple  in  character  for  the  most  part,  and  of  the  same  degree 
of  development  in  the  individuals  of  the  same  species,  the 
actions  which  they  lead  to  are  pretty  imiforni  in  the  same 
circumstances ;  it  is  only  when  a  change  of  circumstances 
makes  a  demand  upon  the  animal's  powers  of  adapta- 
tion that  we  observe  decided  proofs  of  their  existence.  In 
man  the  uniformities  of  belief  and  conduct  are  far  less,  since 
multitudes  of  elements  enter  into  complex  reasonings,  judg- 
ments and  volitions ;  and,  as  these  differ  in  different  persons 
according  to  differences  of  constitution,  temper,  age,  experi- 
ence, circumstances  of  life  and  the  like,  issue  in  results  that 
are  necessarily  various,  uncertain,  seemingly  capricious,  and 
free;  for  when  there  are  as  many  judgments  and  wills 
concerning  an  object  as  there  ai-e  individuals  to  judge  and 
will — of  which  only  one  in  the  end  can  be  right — the  opinion 
may  well  arise  that  they  indicate  self-determination.  It  is 
not,  however,  that  they  are  really  undetermined,  but  it  is 
that  the  determination  is  contingent,  and  not  therefore  to  be 
predicted.  The  prerogative  which  man  has  over  animals  to 
err,  is  the  mark  of  his  larger  and  freer  capacity  to  receive 
and  to  respond  to  impressions  from  the  external  world ;  the 
superiority  lies  not  in  the  mistakes  which  he  makes  but  in 
the  power  which  he  has  to  make  them,  that  power  being  the 
correlative  of  the  power  and  inclination  which  he  has  to 
make  more  special  and  complex  adaptations.  While  inequali- 
ties of  intelligence  therefore  make  inequalities  of  judgments 
and  acts  in  all  complex  cases,  there  is  in  plain  judgments 
concerning  simple  cases  an  absence  of  mistakes,  a  uniformity 
of  general  agreement  that  is  hardly  less  mechanical  and 
authoritative  than  instinct.  So  would  it  be  also  in  the  more 
complex  cases  if  we  had  all  the  elements  of  the  problem  and 


44  WILL   m  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT 

tteir  exact  relations  to  one  another  as  clearly  in  view.  A 
man  might  as  well,  from  a  consciousness  of  power  in  him- 
self, think  to  elude  the  law  of  gravitation  in  his  actions,  as, 
from  any  seeming  self-suflScient  intuition  of  consciousness, 
imagine  he  can  in  his  thought  dispense  with  the  common 
experience  of  the  race. 

If  the  foregoing  reflections  be  well  founded,  they  warrant 
these  conclusions  ;  first,  that  the  deliverance  of  conscious- 
ness, wUetlier  the  state  thereof  be  stirred  by  internal  or 
external  causes,  is  just  as  immediate  in  the  one  case  as  in  the 
other,  and  neither  state  has  an  exclusive  prerogative  or 
even  a  pre-eminence  of  dignity  and  authority  over  the  other ; 
and,  secondly,  that  the  interpretation  of  the  value  of  the 
direct  deliverance  is  in  both  cases  a  matter  of  observa- 
tion and  experience,  not  an  instance  of  direct  intuition — 
in  the  one  case  by  the  co-operating  aids  of  the  different 
senses,  as  the  result  of  the  unity  of  the  bodily  organism,  and 
in  the  other  case  by  the  co-operating  aids  of  the  deliverances 
of  self-consciousness  in  other  persons,  as  the  result  of  the 
unity  of  the  social  organism.  We  invoke  that  common 
store  of  sense,  feeling,  opinion  which  results  from  the 
social  union  of  men  similarly  constituted  and  working 
together  in  a  common  medium  by  common  methods  to 
common  ends,  and  which,  incorporate  in  language,  laws, 
customs,  habits,  institutions,  envelopes  and  penetrates  them 
like  a  social  atmosphere  from  the  first  hour  of  life  to  the 
last.  To  descant  upon  the  self-suflSciency  of  an  individual's 
self-consciousness  is  hardly  more  reasonable  than  it  would 
be  to  descant  upon  the  self-sufficiency  of  a  single  sense.  The 
authority  of  direct  personal  intuition  is  the  authority  of  the 
lunatic's  direct  intuition  that  he  is  the  Messiah ;  the 
vagaries  of  whose  mad  thoughts  notoriously  cannot  be 
rectified  until  he  can  be  got  to  abandon  his  isolating  self- 
sufficiency  and  to  place  confidence  in  the  assurances  and 
acts  of  others. 

May  we  not  justly  say  of  the  individual  that  he  is  bathed 
in  a  social  atmosphere  which  he  breathes  and  is  nourished 
by  mentally,  just  as  each  individual  element  of  bodily  tissue 
is  bathed  in  a  fluid  medium  poured  round  it  from  the  blood  ? 


CONCEENING  THE  AUTHOEITY  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.        45 

And  as  the  blood  is  a  highly  manufactured  fluid  -which  has  its 
place  and  function  intermediate  between  the  living  element 
within  and  the  aliment  supplied  from  without  the  body ;  so 
the  social  atmosphere  is  a  highly  compound  and,  as  it  were, 
humanity-manufactured  medium  that  is  intermediate  between 
the  individual  and  direct  personal  relations  with  the  external 
world.  Without  its  social  atmosphere,  its  sustenance  and 
support,  a  mind  could  no  more  live  and  breathe  than  ail 
element  of  tissue  could  live  without  its  nutritive  medium : 
the  feeling  of  solidarity  pervades  the  individual,  as  his  blood 
circulates,  unconsciously,  vitalising  him  as  a  social  being. 
Let  the  social  medium  undergo  disintegration,  as  it  does  in 
catastrophes  like  the  French  Revolution,  and  what  a  terrible 
spectacle  of  violent  distrust,  insane  suspicions,  unreasoning 
hatreds,  fearful  brutalities,  crimes,  frenzies  and  horrors  does 
man  present !  Without  its  support  he  falls  into  mental 
convulsions,  as  the  body,  drained  of  its  blood,  falls  into 
physical  convulsions. 

It  will  not  be  amiss  by  way  of  summary  to  set  forth  one 
final  reflection  before  ending  this  section.  It  is  the  obvious 
reflection  that  everything  which  we  know  is  a  synthesis  of 
subject  and  object,  the  outcome  of  subject  plus  object ;  and, 
therefore,  every  phase  of  consciousness  being  that,  directly  or 
remotely,  neither  matter-in-itself  nor  mind-in-itself  are  words 
that  have  any  meaning.  The  consciousness  of  the  ego  is 
itself  phenomenal,  a  relation  ;  and  if  so,  a  relation  of  what  ? 
It  matters  not  what  you  call  the  synthesis — subject  and 
object,  mind  and  matter,  or  what  not — it  is  the  only  know- 
able  ;  the  absolutely  unknowable  is  object  without  subject 
and  subject  without  object.  The  hypothesis  of  an  external 
world  is  a  good  working  hypothesis  within  all  human  expe- 
rience, but  to  ask  whether  the  external  world  exists  apart 
from  all  human  experience  is  about  as  sensible  a  question  as 
to  ask  whether  the  shadow  belongs  to  the  sun  or  to  the 
man's  body ;  for  what  an  extraordinarily  perverse  and  futile 
ingenuity  it  palpably  is  to  attempt  to  think  anything  outside 
human  consciousness,  and  what  a  signal  absurdity  to  apply 
any  terms  of  human  experience  to  what  is  not  within  human 
experience  !     To  say  there  is  an  absolute  and  to  call  it  the 


4()  WILL   IN   ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

unknowable,  is  it  a  whit  more  philosophical  than  it  would 
be  for  a  bluebottle  flj  to  call  its  extra-relational  the  unbuz- 
zable  ?  It  is  true  that  we  can  speak,  and  in  some  sort  think,  of 
mind  and  matter  separately,  as  we  think,  or  think  we  think, 
separately  of  inside  and  outside,  circumference  and  centre, 
but  we  cannot  divorce  them  in  fact.  The  divorce  is  a  philo- 
sophical fiction.  If  any  one  insists  on  making  a  divorce  in 
theory  which  is  impossible  in  fact,  he  may  build  up  a 
theoretical  system  of  philosophy,  laying  it  down  as  a  founda- 
tion-principle of  such  philosophy  that  it  is  impossible  to 
conceive  the  passage  from  the  one  to  the  other — whereby 
happily  also  it  is  saved  from  a  tragical  collision  with  facts — 
but  it  is  a  philosophy  of  words  at  the  end  of  all.  Having 
defined  matter  as  that  which  is  multiple,  divisible,  and 
occupies  space,  and  having  then  defined  mind  by  as  exact  a 
negation  of  these  qualities  as  he  can  make — that  is,  as 
something  that  is  simple,  indivisible,  and  does  not  occupy 
space,  he  may  ask  prettily  and  triumphantly  how  can  that 
which  has  extension  act  upon  that  which  has  not  extension  ? 
Therein  he  is  very  much  like  a  professor  of  moral  philosophy 
who,  having  defined  light  as  the  absence  of  darkness,  and 
darkness  as  the  absence  of  light,  should  go  on  to  ask  his 
admiring  pupil  to  set  forth  the  relations  between  these  two 
fundamental  existences.  Beginning  with  two  contradictory 
and  mutually  exclusive  definitions,  it  is  somewhat  gratuitous 
and  superfluous  to  vex  oneself  by  inquiring  how  they  can  be 
brought  into  any  sort  of  accord.  From  that  standpoint  the 
idealism  of  Berkeley  is  assuredly  unanswerable  ;  nay,  per- 
haps the  welcome  and  truly  logical  outcome  of  it  would  be 
Leibnitz's  theory  of  tw^o  clocks  going  and  striking  together 
by  a  divinely  pre-established  harmony. 

A  separation  of  subject  and  object  cannot  ever  be  the 
starting-point  of  a  philosophy  that  is  not  a  self-foolery. 
The  simplest,  primitive,  irreducible  affection  of  consciousness 
which  we  call  feeling  is  not  really  the  simple  thing  it  appears 
inwardly,  but  actually  a  very  compound  effect.  There  is 
a  necessary  order  of  events  antecedent  to  it :  a  stimulus 
to  a  nerve  of  sense,  a  conduction  of  energy  to  the  brain,  a 
particular  change  of  a  part  of  the  brain  in  consequence, 


CONCERNING  THE  AUTHORITY  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.        47 

and  thereupon  or  therewith  an  inseparably  consequent  or 
coincident  state  of  consciousness ;  nor  could  all  the  con- 
sciousnesses in  the  world  ever  have  a  sensation  of  the 
meanest  sort  without  these  physical  antecedents,  immediate 
or  remote.  Neither  the  cerebral  change  nor  the  coincident 
state  of  consciousness  can  be  described  as  pure  object  or 
pure  subject;  both  represent  object  plus  subject,  either 
immediately  as  direct  experience,  or  intermediately  through 
the  registration  of  past  experience  ;  and  the  notion  that  con- 
sciousness can  come  into  any  relation  with  the  object  directly 
and  purely,  or  with  the  subject  directly  and  purely,  is 
revealed  as  a  manifest  absurdity. 

It  was  a  very  natural  rebellion  which  the  common  sense 
of  mankind  made  against  the  Berkleian  doctrine  that  matter  V/ 
had  no  existence  save  in  the  idea  which  we  have  of  it,  when  ■'^^ 
the  accepted  opinion  of  an  idea  was  that  it  was  the  pure 
affection  of  an  essentially  separate  and  independent  internal 
entity  called  mind,  having  no  affinity  with  matter,  and  the 
separate  affections  of  which  had  no  causal  connection  with 
the  cerebral  reactions  to  objects,  no  relation  with  them  but 
that  of  an  arbitrary  parallel  concomitancy.  It  was  the  in- 
stinctive rebellion  of  consciousness  against  a  suicidal  doctrine 
that  would  rob  it  of  half  its  being.  For  the  idea  is  truly 
a  synthesis,  the  ego  and  non-ego  necessary  correlates  ;  and 
not  to  think  the  existence  of  the  not-self  is  as  impossible  as 
jto  think  the  non-existence  of  self — indeed,  to  think  the 
existence  of  one  without  the  other  is  unachievable.  The 
belief  of  them,  like  all  other  beliefs,  may  be  brought  back 
by  analysis  in  the  last  resort  to  the  simple  basis  of  a  reflex  or 
sensori-motor  process;  the  receptive  or  passive  side  thereof 
furnishing  the  basis  of  the  ego,  the  reactive  or  active  side 
the  basis  of  the  non-ego.  That  is  the  physiological  unit  of 
mental  function.  Why  is  it  that  the  primary  properties 
of  matter  always  seem  to  be  more  objective  than  its  so- 
called  secondary  properties  ?  It  is  because,  being  more 
gross  and  palpable,  we  perceive  more  plainly  the  causes  of 
our  affections  by  them,  can  react  upon  these  palpable  causes 
by  fitting  movements,  and  so,  grasping  them  physically, 
apprehend  them    better   mentally.      The    recoil   of    these 


48  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

movements  upon  consciousness  through  tlie  channels  of 
muscular  sense — the  backrush,  as  it  were,  of  their  formal 
sensibilities  whereby  they  become  particular  motor  intuitions 
— must  needs  be  a  different  kind  of  consciousness  from  that 
which  is  stirred  through  any  one  of  the  external  senses, 
except  in  those  cases  in  which  similar  muscular  adaptations 
take  place,  as  is  notably  the  case  in  trained  vision  and  less 
notabl}'-,  but  not  less  certainly,  so  in  every  discrimination  of 
sense.  That  special  mode  of  consciousness  will  be  what  we 
_call  consciousness  of  resistance  or  object-consciousness.  It  is 
to  touch  and  its  motor  adaptations  primarily,  to  sight  and 
its  motor  adaptations  secondarily,  but  to  motor  adaptations  in 
all  cases,  as  Mair  e  de  Biran  pointed  out  long  ago,'  that  we  owe 
mainly,  or  entirely,  our  conception  of  the  non-ego.  Is  there 
a  single  state  of  definite  consciousness  into  which  a  motor 
element  does  not,  explicitly  or  implicitly,  enter  ?  And  if  not, 
how  manifestly  absurd  it  is  seen  to  be  to  talk  of  the  ego  as  if 
it  had  existence  or  meaning  apart  from  the  noiv-ego  ! 

That  the  physiological  unit  of  which  mental  structure  is 
built  up  is  a  reflex  act,  is  a  statement,  objectively  reached,  that 
accords  well  with  what  self-consciousness  teaches  are  the 
simple  and  irreducible  facts  of  psychology — namely,  sensation 
and  the  sense  of  reaction ;  which  last  is,  in  other  words,  the 
sense  of  effort  or  resistance.  Now  these  irreducible  feelings 
are  the  conscious  expressions  of  deeper  unconscious  facts — 
namely,  of  definite  susceptibility  to  impressions  and  definite 
reaction  thereto,  which  are  common  properties  of  all  organic 
matter.  It  is  the  superaddition  or  accompaniment  of  con- 
sciousness that  makes  them  sensation  and  effort ;  and  with  it 
comes  necessarily  at  the  same  time  the  desire  to  ensue  pleasant 
and  to  eschew  painful  impressions.  Were  it  not  to  digress  too 
much,  it  would  be  interesting  to  trace  the  physiological  unit  of 
a  simple  reflex  act  through  a  succession  of  its  multiplying  asso- 
ciations, and  to  exhibit  its  corresponding  outcomes  in  compli- 
cating processes  of  belief  and  will.  For  if  we  inquire  closely 
what  a  belief  in  its  ultimate  basis  is  we  shall  find  it  to  be  the 
conscious  representative  of  an  organised  complex  reflex  act. 

'  Following  in  this,  as  it  appears,  an  earlier  inquirer.     See  Revue  PMloso- 
phique,  October  1882. 


CONCERNING  THE  AUTHOEITY  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.         49 

My  belief  is  really  my  open  or  tacit  conviction  that  on  the 
occasion  of  certain  definite  impressions  npon  my  senses  I 
shall  be  able  to  react  in  relation  to  them  by  certain  definite 
and  fitting  adaptations.  It  might  be  described  as  habit,  or 
rather  habit  in  the  formation,  as  habit  might  be  called  un- 
conscious belief;  for  it  is  formed,  just  as  habit  is  formed,  by 
the  repetition  of  impressions  and  of  the  fitting  reactions  to 
them,  until  a  definite  function  is  fixed.  We  are  restless  and 
dissatisfied,  in  doubt,  until  we  have  formed  the  habit  or  belief, 
because  doubt  is  an  active  state  of  attempt  to  make  the 
fitting  adjustment,  belief  a  quiet  state  of  accomplished 
adjustment.  Infuse  passion  into  it  from  the  depths  of  the 
organic  life,  and  you  get  passionate  belief.  One  needs  not 
really  for  one's  comfort  a  true  belief,  whatever  that  may  be ; 
all  that  is  required  is  a  belief  that  one  believes  to  be  true. 
Belief  is  not  a  fixed  but  a  fluent  state,  though  its  motion 
sometimes,  like  that  of  a  great  glacier,  may  be  so  slow  as  to 
be  perceptible  only  in  a  reach  of  years.  Individuals  advance 
or  retrograde  from  one  belief  to  another,  as  mankind  advance 
or  retrograde  from  one  system  of  belief  to  another  ;  for  ideas 
and  doctrines  being  mortal,  like  all  things  human,  grow, 
decay,  and  die.  To  do  in  his  place  in  life  is  the  proper  func- 
tion of  man,  the  true  end  of  thought  and  belief;  the  mean- 
ing at  the  bottom  of  belief  is  what  habit  of  action  it  pro- 
duces ;  action  therefore  is  the  test  of  clear  meaning  in  a 
belief.  To  know  the  truth  it  is  necessary  to  do  the  truth  ; 
and  to  know  what  a  man's  real  beliefs  are  you  must  study 
his  conduct.  We  rightly  seek  the  meaning  of  the  abstract 
in  the  concrete  because  we  cannot  act  in  relation  to  the 
abstract,  which  is  only  a  representative  sign ;  we  must  give 
it  a  concrete  form  in  order  to  make  it  a  clear  and  distinct 
idea ;  until  we  have  done  so  we  don't  know  that  we  really 
believe,  only  believe  that  we  believe  it.  A  truth  is  best  cer-  . 
tified  to  be  a  truth  when  we  live  it  and  have  ceased  to  talk  ^-^ 
about  it. 

Consider  well,  then,  what  a  multitude  of  elements  any 
belief  implies;  not  elements  only  that  have  contributed  to  its 
formation  and  become  integrant  parts  of  its  structure,  but 
those  also  that  co-operate   silently  in   its   function.     Ccn- 


50  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

sciousness  is  signally  incompetent  to  give  a  satisfactory 
account  of  them,  since  tliey  mostly  belong  to  the  domain  of 
infra-sensibility,  and  only  a  few  rise  into  sensibility  and  intel- 
ligence. Oftentimes  we  invoke  studiously  two  or  three 
conscious  arguments  for  a  belief,  and  are  content  with  them, 
whereas  they  are  perhaps  the  least  part  of  its  true  basis, 
which  is  actually  a  great  multitude  of  inferences  and 
analogies  that  have  combined  in  mental  synthesis  below  the 
threshold  of  consciousness ;  the  tide  of  them,  an  it  were, 
breaking  into  consciousness  with  a  force  and  in  a  direction 
that  differ  greatly  according  to  varying  bodily  states,  states 
of  memory,  present  circumstances,  and  the  like.  How  often 
does  it  happen  that  a  person  believes  and  decides,  on  the 
occasion  of  some  pleasant  impression  that  is  utterly  unre- 
lated to  the  matter  in  hand,  or  of  a  happy  sense  of  bodily 
comfort,  something  which  he  never  would  have  believed  and 
decided  had  no  such  pleasant  impression  been  made,  and 
which  he  would  perhaps  have  believed  and  decided  otherwise 
if,  instead  thereof,  an  unpleasant  impression  had  been  made  ! 
From  the  depths  of  our  beirg  reinforcing  and  opposing 
forces  come  into  action  continually  to  urge  and  to  check, 
without  our  being  in  the  least  aware  of  their  nature  and 
operation. 

Is  it  not  a  little  remarkable  that  the  purest  of  pure 
idealists  shows  virtually  the  greatest  distrust  of  consciousness 
a?rthe  very  moment  when  he  exalts  its  authority  to  infalli- 
bilit}'  ?  In  maintaining  that  all  which  we  know  positively 
and  immediately,  all  that  we  are  indisputably  sure  of,  are  its 
subjective  states,  he  actually  declares  that  the  very  positive 
revelation  of  an  external  world  which  it  makes  us,  including 
therein  all  other  human  beings  and  their  consciousnesses, 
may  be  pure  illusion.  Now  it  is  quite  certain  that  every- 
body feels  as  sure  of  the  reality  of  the  external  object, 
illusion  though  it  be,  as  he  does  of  the  reality  of  himself, 
the  subject,  that  he  has  as  positive  an  intuition  of  the  one 
as  he  has  of  the  other ;  wherefore  it  is  plain  that  conscious- 
ness is  deceiving  him,  if  not  as  to  the  existence  of  an 
external  world,  at  any  rate  as  to  the  value  of  its  testimony 
in  any  case,  forasmuch  as  it  testifies  to  the  object  quite  as 


CONCERNING   THE  AUTHORITY   OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.        51 

positively  as  it  does  to  the  subject.  If,  then,  it  speaks  witli 
as  strong  certitude  when  it  is  saying  what  may  be  false  as  it 
does  when  it  is  telling  the  truth,  how  are  we  to  know  when 
to  trust  its  assurances  ? 

Suppose  a  number  of  dreamers  to  be  going  through  the 
same  dream-drama  at  the  same  time ;  able  to  communicate 
with  one  another  by  a  subtile  sympathy,  so  as  to  know  that 
they  were  all  witnessing  the  same  dream-events  in  the  same 
order;  and  never  awaking  to  find  it  was  a  dream; — they 
would  certainly  believe  in  the  objective  existence  of  their 
subjective  experiences.  May  not  that  be  life  ?  And  the 
true  question  be  not  what  the  external  world  is,  but  how  we 
are  delusively  thinking  it  ?  After  all,  the  world  which  we 
apprehend  when  we  are  awake  may  have  as  little  resem- 
blance, proportion,  or  relation  to  the  external  world  of 
which  we  can  have  no  manner  of  apprehension  through  our 
senses,  as  the  dream-world  has  to  the  world  with  which  our 
senses  make  us  acquainted ;  nay,  perhaps  less,  since  there  is 
some  resemblance  in  the  latter  case  and  there  may  be  none 
whatever  in  the  former.  Our  dreams  are  founded  on  the 
experience  of  our  senses  in  waking  life ;  the  supposed 
dreamers  of  the  same  dream  never  could  have  dreamed  it 
had  they  not  been  awake  at  one  time,  and  so  obtained 
through  similar  sense-experiences  the  material  and  the  forms 
of  perception  which  served  them  in  the  dream.  Clever  in 
invention  as  the  dreamer  is,  he  never  dreams  the  ultra- 
relational — the  external  world  as  it  is  outside  his  relations 
to  it,  in  itself.  But  the  external  world  as  it  is  in  itself  may 
not  be  in  the  least  like  what  we  conceive  it  through  our 
forms  of  perception  and  modes  of  thought ;  no  prior  ex- 
perience of  it  has  ever  been  so  much  as  possible;  and  there- 
fore the  analogy  of  the  dreamer  is  altogether  defective  in 
that  respect. 

The  analogy  is  not,  however,  without  instructive  appli- 
cation to  the  external  world,  not  as  it  is  in  itself,  but  as  we 
know  it ;  which  is  the  question  now.  Is  there  such  external 
world  ?  We  may  suppose,  I  think,  that  mankind,  like  the 
dreamer,  never  could  have  constructed  the  illusion  of  a  world 
outside  it,  without  having  acquired  the  material  and  form  of 


52  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

the  illusion  in  real  experience :  the  conception  of  external 
illusion  would  be  impossible  without  the  conception  of  an 
external  not-illusion ;  to  speak  of  an  illusion  of  sense  is  to 
imply  necessarily  a  prior  real  experience  of  sense  in  the 
race  or  in  the  individual ;  otherwise  the  word  illusion  would 
have  no  meaning-,  and  could  not  ever  have  been  formed. 
Were  common  sense  suffered  to  intrude  into  such  hi^h 
matters,  it  would  probably  conclude  that  men  never  could 
have  constructed  ideally  the  external  world  in  the  same 
fashion  all  the  world  over,  had  they  not  had  long  and  patient 
experience  of  it,  first,  preconsciously,  then  dimly  consciously, 
then  through  all  degrees  of  brightening  consciousness  from 
its  dawn  up  to  clear  noontide.  Is  not  the  dream  of  it,  if 
dream  it  be,  founded  on  that  basis  of  antecedent  experience  ? 
Organic  matter  means  by  its  very  nature  an  involution  of 
the  external,  as  will  be  set  forth  more  at  length  hereafter; 
and  between  human  thought  and  the  external  world  there 
lies  all  the  experience-involuted  organic  matter  from  its 
simplest  protoplasmic  speck  up  to  its  highest  evolution  in 
the  nervous  system  of  man.  The  worth  of  the  testimony  of 
consciousness  as  to  an  external  world,  then,  may  well  be 
greater  than  the  worth  of  its  subjective  testimony,  since  it 
is  pretty  certain  that  the  consciousnesses  of  other  persons, 
and  the  consciousnesses  of  animals,  in  so  far  as  they  are 
similarly  constituted,  give  the  same  kind  of  evidence. 

What  the  world  may  appear  to  the  sensations  of  a 
creature  whose  organisation  is  not  in  the  least  like  mine,  is 
quite  another  matter.  The  external  world  which  the  ojster 
perceives  or  feels  is  assuredly  an  external  world  entirely 
other  than  that  which  I  perceive.  But  its  poor  perception 
— if  it  gets  so  far — and  its  answering  reactions  are  relations 
of  its  self  or  ego  to  a  real  external ;  one  which  1  perceive  to 
be  around  it,  far  outside  the  range  of  its  relations,  as  I, 
whom  it  perceives  not  in  the  least,  am  myself.  It  is  a 
useful  incidental  lesson  for  me,  who  may  learn  from  it  how 
much  is  outside  my  perception  and  what  monstrous  absur- 
dity, on  my  part,  it  is  to  make  any  proposition  concerning 
it.  The  only  noumenon  which  either  oyster  or  I  know  is 
the  noumenon  that  is  in  the  j)henomena ;  it  is  impossible 


CONCEKNING  THE  AUTHORITY  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.        5^ 

either  of  us  should  know  anything  except  as  it  is  manifested 
and  is  felt  or  thought,  not  in  itself,  but  in  us.  I  don't  want 
to  think  the  tJiing-in-itself,  but  I  want  to  think  it  in  me :  if 
it  is  out  of  me,  it  does  not  exist  for  me — cannot  possibly  be 
more  than  a  nonsensical  word  in  any  expression  of  me  ;  and 
for  me  to  think  it  out  of  me,  as  it  is  in  itself,  would  be  anni- 
hilation of  myself.  Now  it  is  plain  that  the  world  which  I 
perceive,  but  which  the  oyster  perceives  not,  has  an  existence 
outside  the  oyster's  consciousness,  whether  that  existence 
and  the  oyster  itself  be  real  external  existences  or,  as  some 
might  argue,  only  subjective  existences  within  me.  If  the 
latter  be  so,  then  it  is  possible  that  I,  in  like  manner, 
may  exist  only  in  the  consciousness  of  a  being  as  much 
above  me  as  I  am  above  the  oyster.  In  any  case,  however, 
it  is  quite  clear  that  I  and  my  consciousness  exist  outside 
the  oyster's  consciousness,  even  if  the  oyster  exist  only  in 
me  ;  that  there  is  a  real  world  of  that  sort  external  to  the 
oyster  or  to  my  special  oyster-consciousness,  since  in  no  case 
is  the  latter  co-extensive  with  my  consciousness. 

By  like  reasoning  I  feel  compelled  to  admit  the  existence 
of  a  real  world  external  to  me,  whether  it  be  a  world  of 
supreme  consciousness  or  a  world  of  supreme  substance. 
Indeed,  is  it  not  the  fact  that  every  other  person's  con- 
sciousness is  a  real  existence  external  to  me  ?  Will  the 
most  extreme  idealist  undertake  consistently  to  maintain 
that  the  consciousness  of  Newton  had  no  real  existence 
outside  the  consciousness  of  the  servant  who  blacked  his 
boots  ?  "Where,  then,  do  we  come  to  ?  If  there  be  a  world 
of  consciousness  external  to  me,  and  if  the  only  reality  be  in 
consciousness,  then  my  real  existence  to  another  person  is 
in  his  consciousness — that  is,  external  to  myself;  and  his 
real  existence  to  me  in  like  manner  in  my  consciousness 
— that  is,  external  to  him.  But  where  does  he  get  his 
consciousness  of  me,  seeing  that  he  can't  get  at  my  con- 
sciousness, which  is  the  only  real  me ;  and  where  do  I  get 
consciousness  of  him,  seeing  that  I  can't  get  at  his  con- 
sciousness? He  has  got  my  real  existence  in  him,  and  I 
have  got  his  real  existence  in  me ;  notwithstanding  that  we 
have  not  the  least  power  of  getting  at  one  another's  con- 


54  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

sciousnesses,  whicli  are  tlie  only  realities.  All  which  is  a 
triumpli  of  philosophy  or  a  reductio  ad  ahsurdum,  according 
to  the  light  in  which  one  elects  to  view  it. 

One  might  pursue  a  similar  argument  with  regard  to 
freewill.  I  am  free  to  myself,  as  thing-in-itself,  says 
philosophy,  not  free  to  others  as  phenomenal  objects  which 
they  observe,  study,  determine  and  calculate  upon  ;  as  another 
person  is  free  to  himself,  as  thing-in-itself,  but  not  free  to  me 
who  observe,  study,  determine,  and  calculate  upon  him.  His 
freedom  then  being  to  me  and  to  all  other  persons  pheno- 
menal, that  is  to  say,  being  in  all  practical  relations,  in  every 
expression  of  it,  a  case  of  determination,  and  my  freedom 
having  the  same  aspect  to  him  and  to  all  other  persons,  my 
freedom  has  no  real  existence  in  any  consciousness  outside 
my  own  ;  it  cannot  therefore  be  counted  upon,  or  even  ad- 
mitted, by  others  in  the  events  of  life,  and  if  not  a  pure 
illusion  of  my  own,  is,  being  not  ever  apparent,  as  good  as  a 
non-existent,  except  so  far  as  the  belief  or  illusion  of  it  may 
be  of  subjective  use  to  me. 

Discussions  of  the  kind  are  struck  with  an  eternal 
barrenness,  because  they  are  based  on  the  notion  of  a  self 
that  has  being  apart  from  external  nature,  instead  of  a  self 
that  has  being  only  as  a  part  of  it :  they  are  little  better 
than  discussions  about  the  contents  of  consciousness  when 
beforehand  its  contents  have  been  emptied  out  of  it.  Self 
and  the  world  do  not  exist  apart,  and  cannot  be  thought 
apart;  and  it  would  be  just  as  true,  if  not  more  true,  to  say 
that  it  is  the  not-self,  not  the  self,  which  alone  has  real  ex- 
istence, as  it  is  to  say  that  the  world  exists  only  in  the  abstract 
consciousness  with  which,  by  a  self-beguiling  trick,  psycho- 
logists invest  each  individual.  Consciousness  testifies  to  the 
not-self  with  as  good  evidence  as  to  the  self,  since  there  is 
no  consciousness  apart  from  a  particular  state  thereof,  and 
each  such  state,  whether  it  be  a  mode  of  simple  sensation 
or  of  complex  will,  is  a  synthesis  of  the  two.  It  is  the 
custom  of  the  psychologist — who  would  persuade  you  that  he 
can  discover  and  expound  the  machinery  and  working  of 
the  clock  by  watching  the  pointer,  or  at  any  rate  can  set 
forth  an  ideal  machinery  that  is  more  real  than  the  real  one 


CONCERNING  THE  AUTHORITY   OF   CONSCIOUSNESS.  55 

— to  affirm  authoritatively  that  lie  knows  immediately  his 
own  consciousness,  implying  or  asserting  that  he  does  not 
know  the  external  world  immediately;  but  to  say  that  he 
knows  his  consciousness  is  nonsense,  since  it  is  the  conscious- 
ness that  is  the  knowing,  and  to  say  that  he  is  conscious  is 
to  suppose  an  ego  prior  to  consciousness.  What  he  knows 
or  is  conscious  of  in  any  case  are  the  contents  of  conscious- 
ness ;  and  they  are  neither  more  nor  less  immediate  or  inter- 
mediate in  one  case  than  in  another. 

Seeing  that  every  act  of  consciousness  is  a  synthesis  of 
ego  and  non-ego,  and  that  without  a  non-ego  there  could  not 
be  any  consciousness  at  all  in  me,  is  it  not  perfectly  legiti- 
mate to  say  that  I  know  the  external  world  immediately, 
and  have  as  good  testimony  to  it  as  I  have  to  myself?  And 
none  the  less  legitimate,  if  you  assume  the  ego  to  be  the 
contents  of  consciousness  of  which  alone  you  are  supposed 
to  get  immediate  knowledge  by  it ;  for  the  ego  without  the 
non-ego  is  impossible  in  fact  and  meaningless  in  thought,  and 
the  abstraction  of  the  ego  from  the  bodily  organisation  and 
the  intuition  of  itself  by  itself  as  a  non-bodily  entity  is  an 
artificial  and  deceptive  process.  To  any  affection  whatever 
of  consciousness  a  prior  state  of  brain  is  essential ;  and  to 
say  so  much  as  that  is  to  involve  the  external  world  in  every 
act  of  consciousness,  since  it  is  by  involution  of  the  external 
that  the  structure  of  the  mental  organisation  has  been 
framed.  All  which,  if  true,  clearly  leaves  no  place  where 
the  will  may  get  the  self-sufficing  nature  which  the  theory  of 
its  freedom  demands.  Certainly  no  absurdity  can  be  greater 
than  those  are  guilty  of  who,  accepting  the  external  world 
as  illusion,  fly  for  a  reality  to  a  self-evolving  universal  and 
absolute  Will  in  nature,  the  evidence  of  which  must  needs  be 
just  as  illusive.  'Tis  but  another  instance  of  the  relative 
pleased  to  dupe  itself  with  the  conceit  of  having  got  beyond 
its  relativity  by  merely  enlarging  its  relative  conception. 


56  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

■1 

SECTION  lY. 

THE  POSITIVE  ASSUKANCE  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Without  doubt  there  are  many  persons  who  will  say  that 
they  care  not  a  jot  for  these  vain  and  empty  disquisitions 
concerning  the  authority  of  consciousness,  being  positively 
sure  of  one  thing :  that  on  a  particular  occasion  every  one 
has  the  power  to  choose  and  decide  between  two  actions,  as, 
for  example,  to  turn  this  way  or  that,  or  to  move  this  foot  or 
that,  when  he  has  no  motive  to  do  the  one  act  rather  than 
the  other ;  and  that  he  can  at  any  moment  make  the  experi- 
ment to  test  and  prove  this.  He  has  no  shadow  of  doubt 
that  he  possesses  that  freedom  of  acting. 

So  far  good ;  but  let  it  be  noted,  in  the  first  place,  that 
he  is  by  the  nature  of  the  supposed  problem  under  the 
compulsion  of  motive  to  choose  to  do  the  one  or  the  other ; 
that  the  extent  of  deterDiination  is  very  great,  and  the 
extent  of  freedom  very  small,  being  the  narrowest  freedom 
only  within  the  limits  of  determination :  in  the  second  place, 
that  he  could  not  choose  to  do  the  one  or  the  other,  could 
not  resolve  to  move  hand  or  foot  as  required,  except  for  the 
power  of  definitely  willing  either  act,  which  he  has  gained 
by  previous  training  and  practice ;  the  particular  freedom 
resting  upon  that  consolidated  basis  of  antecedent  deter- 
minations ;  his  whole  nature,  inherited  and  acquired,  lying 
in  its  executive  capacity  as  means  and  instrument  between 
motive  and  act :  in  the  third  place,  that  he  has  selected  for 
experiment  a  seemingly  completely  indifferent  instance — one 
in  which  it  is  not  of  the  smallest  consequence  which  way  the 
decision  goes  ;  in  which  therefore  the  motive  that  causes  the 
descent  of  the  one  scale  of  the  oscillating  balance  must  be  of 
the  lightest  kind  possible,  hardly  more  than  the  shadow  of  a 
motive,  not  so  much  as  presumably  appreciable.  Is  it  great 
wonder  that  he  fails  to  apprehend  it  ?  He  thinks  perchance 
after  some  vacillation  that  he  will  turn  to  the  left,  and  then, 
just  as  he  is  on  the  point  of  doing  so,  he  determines,  out  of 
the  caprice  to  show  his  freedom,  to  turn  to  the  right,  bring- 


TEE  POSITIVE  ASSUEANCE   OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.  57 

ing  into  operation  that  motive.  Anyhow  the  area  of  un- 
determined will  has,  by  the  conditions  of  the  problem,  by  the 
antecedent  conditions  of  the  power  to  will  at  all  in  the 
matter,  and  by  the  exceeding  lightness  of  the  motive  needed, 
been  brought  to  a  more  than  microscopic  minuteness. 

For  as  to  the  determination  :  it  is  plain  that,  in  order  to 
try  the  matter,  he  has  made  a  general  determination  to  do 
one  of  two  things,  the  one  or  the  other  of  which  must  ensue 
from  the  continuance  of  the  act  of  determination  once  started ; 
secondly,  that  he  has  determined  to  leave  the  final  decision 
to  the  last  moment  and  to  the  last  then  intervening  impulse 
or  accident,  insomuch  that,  so  far  from  deliberately  choos- 
ing and  willing  it,  he  cuts  himself  off  from  the  opportunity 
and  power  of  doing  so :  he  leaves,  in  fact,  to  accident  the 
particular  diversion  of  action  by  which  his  general  determina- 
tion to  do  this  or  that  becomes  the  particular  determination 
to  do  this.  It  is  as  if  a  person,  rolling  a  stone  down  a  steep 
declivity,  which,  once  the  impulse  is  given  to  it,  he  knows 
must  go  with  gathering  force  to  the  bottom,  were  undeter- 
mined on  which  side  of  a  given  mark,  the  narrowest  visible, 
it  should  go,  determined  only  that  it  should  go  as  near  the 
mark  as  possible  on  the  one  side  or  the  other.  His  act  of  de- 
termination, once  started,  continues  in  force,  and  necessitates 
a  particular  result ;  but  what  the  result  shall  be  is  not  the  act 
of  his  choice  or  will,  but  the  effect  of  some  chance-collision 
which  the  stone  makes  in  its  descent,  or  of  the  accidental  bias 
which  all  unawares  he  has  given  to  it  in  the  initial  throw. 
Then  as  to  the  exceeding  smallness,  the  intangibility,  so  to 
speak,  of  the  impulse  or  incident  which  determines  the  par- 
ticular result  in  the  fore- supposed  case  of  oscillating  will : 
it  is  not  thought  anywise  strange  that  there  are  objects  too 
small  to  be  seen  except  by  the  highest  power  of  the  micro- 
scope, or  even  to  be  seen  by  any  power  thereof;  nor  is  it  the 
least  doubtful  that  intensely  active  molecules  imperceptible 
to  sense,  veritably  extra-sensual,  are  the  foundation  of  the 
properties  of  all  visible  matter;  it  surely  then  is  not  a 
matter  of  the  smallest  wonder  that  in  those  physico-mental 
functions,  which  of  all  the  operations  in  nature  known  to  us 
are  the  finest  and  most  subtile,  there  are  agencies  so  fine,  so 


58  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

little  material,  as  to  be  inapprehensible  in  themselves  and 
known  only  bj  their  effects. 

Where  there  is  nearly  an  equilibrium  of  vice  in  a 
character  a  little  virtue  goes  a  long  way,  but  where  there 
is  a  perfect  equilibrium  of  choice  there  can  be  no  decision. 
It  was  Bonnet,  I  believe,  who  made  the  supposition  that  if 
a  soul  independent  of  the  body  were  placed  between  two 
objects  exactly  alike,  or  which  appeared  so,  two  desires  of 
exactly  equal  weight  and  quality,  it  would  rest  in  equilibrium, 
since  there  could  be  nothing  to  incline  it  to  the  one  or  to 
the  other:  it  would  realise  in  itself  the  ideal  position  of 
perfect  freedom,  being  a  will  so  free  from  motive  as  to  be 
incompetent  to  move,  so  exempt  from  determination  that  it 
could  not  determine.  For  what  could  determine  it  the  one 
way  or  the  other  ?  Not  the  objects,  since  they  are  exactly 
alike.  Not  desire,  since  there  could  be  no  desire  to  one  or 
the  other ;  or  if  to  one,  then  equally  to  the  other.  Not  a 
caprice  of  liberty,  since  there  is  nothing  to  stir  caprice  in 
so  pure  and  refined  an  immaterial  substance  placed  exactly 
in  the  centre  of  indifference ;  the  very  notion  of  caprice  in- 
volving necessarily  the  simultaneous  notion  of  not-caprice 
or  motive,  which  is  excluded  by  the  statement  of  the  con- 
ditions of  the  problem.  But  let  this  soul  be  united  to  a 
body,  it  is  then  indifferent  no  longer,  for  it  is  subject  every 
moment  to  numberless  impressions,  of  various  degrees  and 
kinds,  streaming  into  it  from  every  part  of  the  divers 
structures  of  the  complex  and  individtial  whole ;  some  of 
them  more,  others  less,  sensible  to  consciousness,  many  of 
them  insensible.  Then  it  is  impossible  for  it  to  be  indif- 
ferent. But  because  its  tone  is  thus  affected  intimately  and 
deeply  by  impressions  which  it  is  unconscious  of,  it  is 
ignorant  that  it  is  moved  by  any  pressure,  and  believes  itself 
to  be  acting  indifferently. 

Assuredly  the  brain  is  not  to  be  conceived  rightly  as  a 
soft  and  inert  substance,  quiet  in  the  molecules  as  in  the 
mass,  but  far  otherwise :  as  the  seat  of  countless  multitudes 
of  molecular  tremors  that  are  in  relation  with  every  part  of 
the  body,  repelling  and  attracting  one  another,  reinforcing 
and  neutralising,  uniting  into  complex  and  separating  into 


THE  POSITIVE  ASSURANCE  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.  59 

simpler  harmonies ;  and  it  is  the  sum  or  outcome  of  the 
whole  of  these  intimate,  intricate,  and  impalpable  intestine 
motions  which  appears  in  the  illumination  of  consciousness. 
It  is  a  little  strange  perhaps  that  it  has  not  occurred  to 
some  one,  reflecting  how  imperfectly  our  gross  conceptions 
of  matter  cover  the  infinitely  minute  and  subtile  elements  of 
matter  that  minister  to  mental  functions,  to  propound  the 
theory  of  a  special  ether  pervading  the  brain,  if  not  the 
universe,  more  subtile  even  than  the  space-pervading  lumini- 
ferous  ether,  and  to  call  it  the  mentiferous  ether. 

In  the  previously  supposed  case  of  the  individual  in  a 
state  of  as  great  indifference  as  possible,  in  a  state  conse- 
quently which  the  least  impulse  was  capable  of  disturbing, 
if  he  did  not  act  from  a  caprice  of  showing  his  freedom  by 
doing  the  opposite  of  what  his  first  thought  was  to  do,  but 
acted  without  thinking  or  caring  in  the  least  what  he  did, 
without  any  conscious  motive,  he  certainly  acted  from  the 
inclination  of  his  present  nature  ;  the  required  little  turn 
between  the  two  paths,  one  of  which  he  must  take,  being 
given  probably  by  some  insensible  bodily  impulse.  Do  you 
ask  by  what  impulse  ?  By  one  or  another  of  a  thousand 
possible  bodily  impulses  :  perhaps  by  an  artery  of  one  side 
of  the  body  going  more  directly  to  the  brain,  or  having  a 
fuller  stream  of  blood  in  it,  than  the  corresponding  artery 
on  the  other  side ;  perhaps  by  a  slight  difference  in  tem- 
perature between  one  nerve-centre  and  another ;  perhaps 
by  the  insensible  impression  of  some  visceral  organ  upon  the 
brain,  or  by  one  of  many  other  similar  conceivable  causes. 
The  shades  that  wander  forlorn  in  the  realms  of  Tartarus, 
being  well-nigh  rid  of  their  bodies,  are  they  therefore  more 
free  than  we  who  are  heavily  encumbered  with  the  trammels 
of  them?  Alas!  they  have  perhaps  discovered  that  in 
losing  their  bodies  they  have  lost  tiie  very  sources  of  will, 
and  now  feel  it  their  eternal  misery  to  wander  eternally 
\nll-less.  It  happens  frequently,  in  a  matter  about  which  we 
find  it  difficult  to  choose  or  decide,  that  we  know  not  in  the 
least  what  determination  we  shall  come  to  until  we  actually 
come  to  it ;  then  perhaps  we  are  at  a  loss  to  know  what 
determined  us,  and  either  remain  puzzled  and  uncertain,  or 


60  "WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

are  not  satisfied  until  we  have  thouglit  out  some  motive 
whicli,  tliougli  it  had  little  or  nothing  to  do  with  the  result, 
we  are  happy  to  persuade  ourselves  was  the  actuating  one. 

It  may  be  assumed  that  pure  intelligence  or  pure  reason 
could  not  determine  action  at  all,  since  such  purity  would 
be  the  extinction  of  desire,  perfect  repose,  a  passionless 
peace  of  mind ;  the  fundamental  spring  of  action,  through 
whatever  complex  developments  of  sentiment  it  may  go,  is 
the  desire  to  gain  pleasure  and  to  shun  pain — that  is  to  say, 
the  impulse  to  maintain  and  increase  life.  The  conflict 
between  two  issues  in  the  mind  is  not  a  conflict  really 
between  reason  and  desire,  intelligence  and  passion,  as 
simple  opposing  forces,  the  mighty  intelligence  of  a  man 
like  Bacon  being  notoriously  powerless  to  overcome  one  of 
the  meanest  passions  of  human  nature,  but  a  conflict 
between  desire  and  desire ;  the  counterpull  of  the  one 
against  the  other  not  being  for  the  most  part  a  single  desire, 
but  the  resultant  of  a  complex  interaction  of  desires  in  that 
which  we  call  deliberation  or  reason.  May  we  not  say  of 
passion  that  it  is  distributed  through  the  whole  body,  and 
of  reason  that  it  is  confined  to  the  supreme  centres  of  the 
brain,  because  it  is  in  them  that  the  desires  fight  out  their 
battles,  and  by  the  struggle  which  they  make  for  existence 
attain  and  maintain  an  equilibrium?  What  number  of 
conflicting  or  modifying  sentiments  shall  go  into  the  opposite 
scales  of  the  balance  in  deliberation,  and  in  what  forms, 
gross  or  refined,  they  shall  show  themselves,  will  depend 
partly  upon  the  native  capacity  of  the  mind,  its  natural 
heritages  and  aptitudes,  and  partly  upon  the  degree  and 
character  of  its  development.  In  the  young  child  and  in  the 
savage,  present  desire  passes  instantly  into  action,  because 
it  is  not  confronted  by  opposing  desires  derived  from  past 
experience  and  laid  by  in  the  mind,  ready  to  be  kindled  into 
restraining  or  modifying  activity;  in  the  man  of  large  and 
much  meditative  understanding,  desire  maybe  so  neutralised 
by  the  many  desires  brought  into  deliberation  as  that 
resolution  is  *  sicklied  o'er  with  the  pale  cast  of  thought,' 
and  action  paralysed.  You  shall  sometimes  see  a  man 
whose  powerful  reason  has  grasped  all  the  relations,  weighed 


THE  POSITIVE  ASSURANCE  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.  61 

all  the  circumstances,  and  forecasted  all  tlie  issues  of  events 
exactly,  fixed  nevertheless  in  hesitating  impotence  to  act, 
because  he  is  in  the  hapless  plight  of  having  no  inferior 
powers  to  execute  the  decrees  of  judgment. 

If  one  wished  to  present  an  instance  of  a  supposed  and 
seeming  operation  of  cool  intelligence  untinctured  by  desire, 
and  to  observe  it  in  its  deep  actual  relation  to  the  natural 
passions  of  human  nature,  one  might  be  tempted  to  select 
the  appreciation  of  some  purely  scientific  theory.  Here, 
surely,  there  is  no  necessity  for  the  elimination  of  personal 
prejudice,  no  mixture  of  passion  to  prevent  a  dear  and 
sincere  apprehension  of  it,  no  room  for  envy,  no  cloud  of 
feeling  to  dim  the  white  light  of  the  understanding,  nothing 
but  a  calm  and  pure  love  of  truth  !  Alas !  this  is  an  ideal 
vision.  SeK-love  is  at  work  as  a  powerful  factor ;  it  operates 
so  deeply,  intimately,  and  unconsciously  that  the  intellect 
cannot  act  freely  even  with  the  best  intentions,  feeling  'its 
backward  pull  when  it  goes  against  it,  its  forward  push 
when  it  goes  with  it.  A  clear  and  cold  love  of  truth,  a 
passionless  serenity  of  reason,  will  not  withstand  it.  Reason 
must  be  beguiled,  or  bribed,  or  ruled,  without  knowing  it. 
In  the  best  case  one  must  oppose  to  it  an  enthusiasm  for 
truth,  which  is  truly  passion  into  which  self-love  has  been 
cleverly  enticed,  and  so  transformed  as  no  longer  to  know 
itself.  Now  when  we  get  to  the  depths  of  self-love  in  the 
attempt  to  fathom  motives  we  strike  upon  those  yet  unex- 
plored strata  of  the  constituents  of  mind  that  are  contri- 
buted by  the  organic  life. 

Let  me  go  on  now  to  supplement  the  foregoing  example 
of  motives  in  apparent  equilibrium  by  the  presentation  of 
another  example,  in  which  the  scales  are  very  unequally 
weighted,  and  deliberation  therefore  is  a  very  swift  aifair : 
an  infant  on  the  verge  of  toddling  over  a  precipice  and  a 
humane  person  standing  by  with  the  power  to  interpose  and 
save  it.  There  is  no  balancing  of  motives  then.  Theoreti- 
cally, the  man  has  the  choice  of  two  courses — to  do  or  not 
to  do  anything ;  but  practically  the  will  is  constrained  to 
such  instant  action  one  way,  by  the  sudden  unloosing  of 
human  sympathies  in  him  on  the  touch  of  the  fit  occasion, 


62  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

that  it  has  not  the  least  power  to  incline  to  the  opposite 
course.  His  act  of  rescue  is  instant  and  instinctive,  no  less 
essentially,  though  more  circuit ously,  reflex  than  the  quick 
movement  which  he  would  make  to  save  himself,  were  he 
himself  on  the  point  of  falling  over  the  precipice.  Where, 
then,  is  the  freedom  of  his  will  ?  All  its  freedom  lies  in  the 
power  to  do  what  it  is  constrained  to  do,  as  all  liberty  is  the 
liberty  that  a  thing  free  from  constraint  has  to  obey  the 
necessity  of  its  nature.  Were  sufficient  time  given  for  re- 
flection, there  would  be  the  opportunity  of  choosing  the 
coiu'se  of  not  stirring  a  step  to  save  the  child ;  but  could  the 
humane  man  choose  it  ?  We  should  not  blame  a  dog  which 
made  no  movement  in  like  circumstances,  because  it  has  not 
the  social  nature  in  its  mental  constitution,  and  the  occasion 
therefore  unlocks  no  inward  forces  in  it ;  but  if  any  human 
being  did  so,  his  conduct  would,  by  the  universal  consent  of 
mankind,  be  pronounced  most  extraordinary  and  unaccount- 
able, and  stigmatised  as  unnatural  and  inhuman  ;  people 
would  find  it  impossible  to  conceive  the  motive  which  could 
have  actuated  him.  Were  he  to  assign  the  freedom  of  the 
will  as  a  sufficient  explanation,  consistently  claiming  for 
himself  a  freedom  of  will  to  think  and  feel  as  well  as  to 
act,  he  would  be  thought  to  add  an  insult  to  the  under- 
standing of  mankind  to  the  outrage  against  its  humanity. 
If  he  assigned  as  a  good  reason  his  conviction  that  the 
deaths  of  a  great  many  children  would  be  truly  a  blessing, 
inasmuch  as  there  are  far  too  many  alive  for  whom  to  hope 
even  a  moderately  happy  existence,  and  still  people  go  on 
begetting  them  recklessly,  as  they  would  take  a  pinch  of 
snufip,  without  the  smallest  regard  to  anything  but  their 
own  momentary  gratification,  he  would  be  execrated  as  an 
inhuman  monster,  though  all  that  he  said  might  be  soberly 
true.  Were  he  to  protest  that  he  had  not  been  actuated  by 
any  motive,  his  assertion  would  be  scouted  with  scorn,  for  it 
would  be  assumed  that  the  very  singularity  of  his  conduct 
implied  a  very  extraordinary  motive.  Madmen  are  the  only 
persons  who  are  allowed  to  act  without  motives,  or  at  any 
rate  without  such  motives  as  commend  themselves  to,  and 
can  be  counted  on  by,  sane  persons.     With  the  latter  the 


THE  POSITIVE  ASSUEANCE  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.  63 

necessity  of  motives  to  actuate  the  will,  either  as  first  agent 
in  the  series  of  processes  that  issue  in  it,  or  as  one  of  the 
antecedents  starting  into  clearer  consciousness  than  the  rest, 
is  such  that  when  they  are  not  educed  nor  supplied  by  the 
occasion,  and  the  decision  hangs  accordingly  in  suspense, 
recourse  is  had  sometimes  to  lots  or  chance  in  order  thus  to 
obtain  anyhow  the  preponderance  of  motive  to  act  upon  the 
will.  I  never  yet  heard  of  anybody  who  maintained  that  a 
penny  showed  freewill,  because,  when  it  was  tossed  into 
the  air,  he  could  not  predict  whether  it  would  fall  heads  or 
tails  uppermost.  Everybody  knows  that  it  will  fall  with  the 
one  face  or  the  other  uppermost ;  that  the  result,  whatever 
it  be,  is  a  necessity,  though  a  contingency ;  and  that  it 
would  be  no  contingency,  but  foreseen  as  a  certainty,  if  the 
size,  shape  and  structure  of  the  coin,  the  exact  quality, 
measure,  and  direction  of  the  force  used  in  tossing  it,  and 
all  the  external  conditions,  were  formulated  in  the  proper 
complex  problem,  and  that  were  worked  out  accurately. 

Between  the  two  extreme  instances  adduced — the  one,  of 
vacillating  irresolution  in  which  reasons  are  balanced,  so 
evenly  that  the  shadow  of  a  motive  suffices  to  turn  the  oscil- 
lating scale ;  the  other,  of  instant  determination  where  a 
moment's  deliberation  is  excluded — a  multitude  of  instances 
might  be  brought  forward  to  illustrate  every  step  of  a  grada- 
tional  transition  from  the  one  to  the  other.  One  instance 
more  may  suffice  here  :  that  of  two  persons  placed  in  circum- 
stances of  temptation  as  nearly  alike  as  possible,  who  act 
quite  differently ;  two  men  passionately  in  love  and  in  inti- 
mate intercourse  with  the  objects  of  their  affection,  the  one 
of  whom  yields  recklessly  to  the  temptation  of  seduction, 
while  the  other  does  not.  Will  any  one  soberly  maintain 
that  these  persons  had  the  same  strength  of  passion,  the 
same  power  of  choice,  the  same  freedom  of  will  ?  Or  can 
any  one  suppose  seriously  that  the  virtuous  person  was  not 
actuated  by  strong  motives  of  prudence  or  conscience  in  his 
successful  stand  against  the  urgent  temptation  ?  The  will, 
— or  preferring  facts  to  phrases,  let  us  say  the  man — was  not 
less  determined  in  the  one  case  than  in  the  other ;  in  the 
one  his  freedom  was  in  doing,  in  the  other  it  was  in  not 


64  WILL  IN  ITS  IHETAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

doing,  but  in  both  it  was  in  acting  according  to  tlie  motives 
which  urged  him — that  is  to  say,  in  not  being  vicious  when 
his  will  was  virtuously  motived,  and  in  not  being  virtuous 
when  it  was  viciously  motived.  Character  and  motives 
being  what  they  were,  the  virtuous  man  was  not  free  to  be 
vicious,  nor  the  vicious  man  free  to  be  virtuous.  It  is  not 
likely  that  any  one  would  cai'e  to  question  or  dispute  this  in 
the  particular  case,  especially  if,  in  order  to  make  the  ex- 
ample stronger,  we  suppose  the  vicious  man  to  have  been 
little  higher  than  an  idiot,  and  the  virtuous  man  little  lower 
than  an  angel;  he  may  like  better  to  suppose  the  case  of  a 
person  who  has  succumbed  to  temptation  on  one  occasion, 
but  who  withstands  it  on  another  similar  occasion.  Herein 
he  sees  proof  that  he  might  have  resisted  successfully  on  the 
first  occasion. 

But  there  is  no  such  proof.  What  is  proved  is  that  the 
person  has  done  differently  when  he  and  the  circumstances, 
although  very  nearly,  were  not  quite,  the  same.  It  is  not 
possible  to  have  a  recurrence  of  the  same,  or  to  suppose 
the  recurrence  of  exactly  similar,  circumstances  to  the 
same  person,  and  so  to  test  the  will's  freedom  by  the  de- 
monstration of  its  power  to  act  differently  in  them ;  the 
circumstances  and  events  are  necessarily  different  on  the 
second  occasion ;  they  are  a  recurrence — that  is,  the  occur- 
rence of  circumstances  as  exactly  similar  as  possible  plies 
the  experience  of  the  first  occasion.  That  difference  in  the 
antecedents  suffices  to  make  the  difference  in  the  conse- 
quence. On  both  occasions  the  individual  does  that  which 
pleases  him  best  at  the  moment,  choosing,  if  he  chooses  ill, 
the  semblance  of  good ;  for  he  and  the  occasions  are  dif- 
ferent. Moreover,  without  the  superadded  antecedent  made 
by  the  precedent  experience,  there  might  easily  be  manifold 
differences  in  the  antecedent  and  constituent  elements  of  the 
volition,  imperceptible  or  unperceived  either  by  himself  or 
by  others.  His  passion  may  have  had  less  force  by  reason 
of  different  physiological  conditions  of  which  he  was  un- 
conscious ;  his  reflection  may  have  had  a  little  freer  play 
because  of  the  mitigation  of  his  passion ;  the  susceptibility 
of  sense,  or  the  rate  of  conduction  in  nerve-fibres,  may  have 


THE  POSITIVE  ASSURANCE  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.  65 

been  a  little  lowered  bj  a  lower  temperature  of  tbem,  or  by 
other  causes,  so  tbat  the  message  came  ever  so  little  later, 
or  with,  ever  so  little  less  urgency.^  His  mistress  may  have 
said  or  done  some  trivial  thing  which  stirred  ever  so  little 
revulsion  of  feeling  at  the  critical  moment;  a  look,  a  gesture, 
a  whiff  of  odour,  a  tone  of  her  voice  may  have  struck  and 
diverted  his  attention  at  the  instant,  or  have  been  a  dis- 
cordant jar  in  the  tension  of  his  high-strung  feeling  and 
produced  a  revulsion  thereof;  some  seemingly  small  thing  in 
him  or  in  her,  impinging  on  one  sense  or  other  and  affect- 
ing the  organic  tone,  would  be  enough  to  make  the  circum- 
stances and  the  result  different.  And  in  every  nature  the 
mood  or  feeling  is  a  deeper  fact  than  the  thoughts  and  fan- 
cies, and  has  a  greater  influence  upon  thought  and  conduct. 
Reflect  how  slight  an  impression — the  glance  of  a  woman,  or 
the  tone  of  her  voice — moves  a  man  to  the  depths  of  his  being, 
thrilling  through  every  fibre  of  him ;  and  moves  him  in  that 
way  at  one  time,  when  his  body  is  in  a  certain  physiological 
tone,  while  it  has  no  effect  at  another  time  and  in  another 
state  of  body.  Has  it  not  happened  sometimes,  in  an  inter- 
view with  another  person,  that  we  have  said  what  we  had  re- 
solved beforehand  not  to  say,  or  have  not  said  what  we  had 
resolved  beforehand  to  say ;  not  from  anything  said  by  him 
directly  to  provoke  or  to  check  the  utterance,  but  because  a 
tone  of  voice,  a  gesture,  a  shade  of  expression,  something, 
however  little — we  know  not  perhaps  what — vibrating  through 
the  inmost  mental  recesses,  has  sufliced  to  loosen  a  spring  or 
to  repress  one  ?  A  sensation  that  is  so  slight  as  seemingly  to 
be  petty  and  indifferent  will  assuredly  act  sometimes  in  a  far- 
reaching  and  surprising  way  to  excite  or  to  inhibit. 

The  same  individual  in  the  same  circumstances  or  acted 

'  When  a  stimulus  acts  upon  a  nerve,  there  is  an  appreciable  period 
between  the  application  of  the  stimulus  and  the  nerve's  response  to  it,  which 
period  of  '  latent  stimulation '  is  known  physiologically  as  the  '  excitatory 
stage.'  This  period  is  measurably  longer  when  the  temperature  of  the  nerve 
is  lowered,  and  during  it  the  nerve  is  insusceptible  to  stimulus.  In  like  manner 
the  rate  of  conduction  in  a  nerve  is  lowered  by  a  low  temperature.  And  does 
not  cold  benumb  thought  and  freeze  passion  7  It  is  not  likely  that  Newton 
would  have  thought  out  the  law  of  gravitation  had  he  lived  near  the  North 
Pole. 


66  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

upon  by  tlie  same  motives — is  a  conception  which  an  ideal 
philosophy  possessed  of  an  omniscience  of  self  will  alone 
dare  to  entertain  ;  since  a  philosophy  which  took  an  account 
of  the  complex  facts  could  never  hope  to  comprehend  and 
appraise  the  individual  in  that  exact  way.  An  accidental 
and  passing  occasion  shall  bring  back  distinctly  into  sudden 
illumination,  without  a  perceptible  connection,  some  remote 
event  which  otherwise  we  should  have  forgotten  for  ever.  It 
was  there,  though  we  knew  it  not,  but  where?  And  if 
somewhere  in  our  inmost  being,  not  dead  but  sleeping,  latent 
but  not  patent,  when  we  know  not  of  its  existence,  how 
estimate  its  influence  by  any  self -inspection  or  psychological 
intuition  ?  It  happens  to  us  frequently  to  recollect  a  par- 
ticular conversation  or  event  in  the  remote  past  because  it 
made  a  deep  impression  upon  us  at  the  time,  and  yet  to 
forget  numberless  other  impressions  that  really  exercised  a 
more  deep  and  lasting  influence  while  we  thought  not  of 
them.  Consider,  for  example,  the  very  positive  eflFects  on 
character  that  are  produced  insensibly  by  the  circumstances 
^  the  particular  circle  of  society  in  which  we  live ;  we  are 
not  aware  of  the  modification  which  we  undergo  ;  but  if  we 
enter  a  new  social  circle,  or  return  to  an  old  one,  it  is 
revealed  to  us,  by  the  instant  pleasures  or  aversions  which 
we  feel,  how  gradually  and  silently  our  character  has 
been  modified.  Perhaps  we  have  longed  to  go  back  to  a 
former  manner  of  life  which  is  surrounded  in  memory  with 
a  halo  of  enjoyment,  during  several  years  spent  in  another 
and  quite  different  sort  of  life,  eagerly  promising  ourselves 
the  renewal  of  former  delights  ;  but  how  sadly  and  some- 
times ludicrously  disappointing  is  the  experiment,  if  we 
make  it !  We  discover  with  dismay  that  our  feelings  and 
judgments  are  different ;  that  we  are  entirely  changed, 
though  we  knew  it  not ;  that  our  self-inspection  has  com- 
pletely failed  us,  and  our  self-consciousness  completely 
deluded  us ;  and  we  hasten  to  escape  from  the  scenes  that 
we  had  so  ardently  longed  to  revisit  and  from  the  experi- 
ences that  we  had  hoped  to  repeat.  Growing  to  his  modes  of 
impression  and  exercise,  as  in  his  subordinate  motor  so  in 
his  higher  mental  functions,  the  individual  feels  as  little  at 


THE  POSITIA^  ASSUEAl^CE   OF   CONSCIOUSNESS.  67 

home  in  an  old  circle  whicli  lie  tlius  re-enters  as  lie  does 
when  he  returns  to  practise  a  difficult  exercise  of  bodily 
skill  that  he  had  relinquished  for  years. 

It  is  impossible  for  any  one  who  has  not  made  a  diligent 
study  of  the  physiology  of  the  body  to  appreciate  the  many 
and  various  influences  which  continually  work  upon  the 
mind,  and  the  divers  subtile  ways,  direct  and  indirect,  in 
which  they  work,  to  determine  its  moods,  feelings,  and 
impulses — to  trace  back  to  their  origin  the  roots  of  the 
factors  that  go  to  make  motives  and  to  discover  the  intricate, 
circuitous,  and  far-reaching  inhibitions  and  impulsions,  the 
weakenings  and  invigorations,  to  which  they  are  exposed 
both  in  formation  and  function.  He  apprehends  only  that 
which  is  within  the  light  of  consciousness,  whereas  these 
are  outside  it,  below  its  threshold,  insensible,  a  complex 
composition  of  intricate  forces  that  is  known  oul}^  or  mainly 
in  the  result.  It  is  probable  that  a  study  of  the  light- 
bearing  experiments  and  discoveries  of  Claude  Bernard 
respecting  the  functions  of  the  sympathetic  system  of  nerves 
and  the  intimate  phenomena  of  life,  might  yield  him  more 
insight  into  that  matter  than  all  the  disquisitions  of  philo- 
sophers can  ever  do ;  at  any  rate,  without  such  adequate 
conception  of  facts,  as  the  foundation  of  his  enterprise,  he  is 
ill  furnished  to  make  a  fruitful  study  of  mental  functions, 
and  well  fitted  to  continue  in  barren  and  futile  discussions. 

Is  it  not  an  inexhaustible  wonder  that  any  one  should 
think  to  divorce  mind-functions  from  the  body  to  which  they 
are  inseparably  united,  should  deal  with  them  as  the  pro- 
perties of  an  abstraction  called  a  non-bodily  self,  and  should 
maintain  that  they  may  be  studied  adequately  from  a  purely 
internal  station?  A  singular  philosophy,  indeed,  which 
aspires  to  measure  and  appraise  impulses  of  will  springing 
out  of  the  passion  of  sexual  love,  without  giving  the  least 
thought  to  the  existence  of  sexual  organs  and  the  essential 
influence  which  they  and  their  differing  states  exercise  in  de- 
termining, not  only  the  very  quality  of  sensibility,  but  the 
specific  nature  and  strength  of  the  passion  and  of  its  motor 
outcomes!  It  would  be  curious  to  see  explained  from  the 
moral  data  of  pure  psychology  the  changes  of  mood  and  the 


68  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

violent  outbreaks  of  temper  tliat  occur  in  an  elephant,  hitherto 
invariably  good  and  gentle,  after  it  has  undergone  the  phy- 
sical changes  of  puberty  ;  or  to  observe  what  place  religion, 

Y     poetry,  and  morality  had  in  the  pure  and  abstract  mental 

philosophy  of  a  sexually  emasculated  mankind.     Tlie  meta- 

,  physical  psychologist — who  for  a  long  time  maintained  that 

/  all  men  had  naturally  equal  capacities  of  intelligence,  the 
inequalities  of  their  actual  understandings  being  ascribed  tq 
\  differences  of  culture  on  their  part,  and  who  still  maintains 
for  the  most  part  that  all  men  are  equally  capable  of  good 
naturally,  and  might  be  equally  good  actually  if  they  so  willed 
it — would  be  content  to  imagine  the  stomach,  liver,  or  heart 
of  one  person  transplanted  into  the  body  of  another  person 
in  the  place  of  its  own  organs,  in  the  confident  assurance 
that  it  would  make  no  difference  in  his  character;  or, 
perhaps,  to  imagine  the  brain  of  one  new-born  infant  taken 
out  and  put  into  the  skull  of  another,  in  the  full  conviction 
that  ancestral  heritages  would  not  hinder  the  one  from  being 
just  as  good,  and  doing  just  as  well,  as  the  other. 

In  reality  the  psychologist  would  be  much  nearer  the 
truth  were  he  to  assert  a  difference  in  mind  in  every  case, 
human  or  animal,  in  which  he  observed  a  difference  of  body. 
Could  one  imagine  the  paws  of  a  lion  fixed  to  the  ends  of 
the  legs  of  a  sheep  in  the  place  of  its  own  feet,  we  should 
justly  look  for  a  correlative  change  of  character  in  the  sheep  ; 
not  at  once,  if  the  organic  transplantation  were  a  recent  ex- 
periment, because  some  time  must  elapse  for  the  foot  to 
obtain  its  proper  representation  in  the  sheep's  brain ;  but 
when  in  full  time  the  innermost  and  the  outermost  had  been 
brought  into  accord,  the  brain  into  correlation  with  the  foot, 
then  the  sheep's  character  would  certainly  be  mightily 
changed.  The  animal  would  not  be  converted  into  a  lion, 
it  is  true,  because  it  is  the  wliole  organisation  of  the  lion, 
not  a  part  only,  that  makes  its  ferocious  character,  and  it  is 
the  brain  which  expresses  it,  as  containing  in  innermost 
representation  and  in  due  co-ordination  all  the  characters  of 
the  outermost ;  but  the  sheep  would  be  no  longer  a  sheep, 
its  character  would  be  entirely  changed ;  it  would,  in  fact, 
be  a  new  animal,  morally  as  well  as  physically. 


THE  POSITIVE  ASSURANCE   OF   CONSCIOUSNESS.  69 

It  were  mucli  to  be  wished  that  the  philosophers  of  the 
study  would  consider  frankly  and  loyally  the  instance  of  a 
weak  and  timid  animal  whose  urgent  instinct  is  to  save 
itself  from  its  natural  enemies  by  instant  flight,  but  which, 
when  it  has  young  ones,  faces  its  dreaded  enemy  and  engages 
in  a  desperate  and  absurdly  hopeless  battle  in  their  defence. 
It  assuredly  does  not  stay  to  reason  either  when  it  flies  or 
when  it  fights ;  for  in  either  case  it  acts  in  obedience  to  its 
predominant  impulse  or  instinct.  But  how  has  this  very  re- 
markable transformation  of  nature  been  brought  about  ? 
By  maternal  affection  obviously ;  out  of  which  feeling  has 
sprung  the  impulse  that  preponderates  over  its  strong  natural 
impulse  to  save  itself  by  flight.  In  the  one  case  it  perceives 
intensely — feels  vividly  rather  than,  perceives  definitely 
perhaps — its  enemy  and  nothing  else,  its  consciousness 
being  concentrated  in  the  perception,  feeling  and  action  asso- 
ciated with  that  vividly  active  nerve-centre,  and  other 
consciousnesses  being  inhibited ;  in  the  other  case,  it  perceives 
or  feels  intensely  its  young  and  their  danger,  its  conscious- 
ness being  concentrated  in  that  group  of  perceptions,  feeling 
and  conduct,  and  other  consciousnesses  being  inhibited. 
Like  one  in  an  ecstasy,  or  like  a  hypnotic  person,  it  is 
absorbed  in  a  circumscribed  psychical  activity,  the  rest  of  its 
mind  being  inactive.  There  is  no  conscious  reasoning  in 
the  matter,  no  advised  action,  no  deliberate  determination  of 
will,  nothing  more  than  different  feeling  and  different  action 
springing  instantly  from  changed  bodily  conditions.  It  is  an 
organic  machine  that  is  put  into  the  two  different  frantic 
actions  by  two  difterent  springs.  Is  there  any  mental  philo- 
sophy which  can  give  the  least  explanation  of  the  new 
motives  that  occasion  so  new  and  brave  a  will,  one  too  which 
is  so  entirely  alien  from  the  ordinary  timid  nature  of  the 
creature  ?  Philosophy  has  been  in  face  of  the  fact  since  its 
own  birth  unto  now  without  getting  any  further  than  the 
discovery  that  it  acts  from  instinct — that  is  to  say,  that  it 
acts  so  because  it  is  in  it  to  do  so.  Is  it  any  better  mental 
^ilosophy  which,  ignoring  the  not  less  powerful  bodily 
causes  that  affect  man's  moods  of  will,  discusses  them  as 
qualiiSes  of  pure  abstractions  ?     To  have  any  understanding 


70  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

in  the  matter  we  must  substitute  for  the  metaphysical  notion 
of  a  mental  unity  the  physiological  conception  of  a  con- 
federation of  nerve-centres,  that  are  severally  in  intimate 
relation  with  the  various  organs  and  specialised  functions  of 
the  body,  and  endeavour  by  patient  observation  and  experi- 
ment to  find  out  and  to  set  forth  the  special  correlations 
between  the  distant  parts  and  the  innermost  nerve-centres. 

It  is  as  easy  as  it  is  puerile  and  profitless  to  prove  the 
undetermined  nature  of  an  energy  by  excluding  arbitrarily 
from  the  problem  all  consideration  of  the  most  important 
determining  conditions,  as  those  necessarily  do  who  begin 
by  enforcing  the  adequacy  of  a  method  of  introspective 
inquiry  which  cannot  possibly  take  account  of  them,  and  by 
rejecting  the  method  of  inquiry  which  alone  can  give  an 
account  of  them.  It  is  to  carry  the  pleasant  comedy  a  little 
further  to  put  an  abstraction  in  the  place  of  these  excluded 
real  energies, and  to  invoke  its  agency  as  an  all-sufficient  expla- 
nation ;  thus,  as  always,  the  apt  word  being  made  to  do  duty 
for  the  lacking  idea.  The  particular  volition  is  an  act  of,  or 
caused  by,  the  will ;  the  will  is  not  caused  by  anything  but 
itself;  the  former  we  may  observe  and  deal  with  practically, 
as  we  do  with  other  forms  of  energy,  the  latter  is  super- 
natural and  known  only  by  intuition :  all  the  changing 
volitions  of  daily  life,  bettering  or  worsening  as  we  advance 
in  years,  strong  in  health  and  weak  in  sickness,  infantile  in 
the  child  and  imbecile  in  idiocy,  inspired  in  the  man  of 
genius  and  common-place  in  common-place  people,  brutally 
vigorous  in  some  practical  men  and  weak  and  impulsive  in 
most  women,  always  fluctuating,  never  exactly  the  same,  in 
quality  and  energy  in  the  same  individual ; — all  these  are 
caused  by  the  will ;  they  vary  infinitely  in  power  and  quality, 
but  it  changes  not  in'its  essence ;  they  acknowledge  time, 
place,  and  conditions,  but  it  is  serene  above  time,  place,  and 
conditions.  Why  meanwhile  they  should  change  so  much 
in  the  individual  when  they  have  an  unchanging  cause  does 
not  clearly  appear.  If  it  be  perchance  owing  to  the  imper- 
fections and  the  varying  states  of  the  instruments  or  organs 
through  which  they  are  constrained  to  manifest  themselves, 
then  one  cannot  well  see  how  its  subjection  to  imperfect 


THE  POSITIVE  ASSURANCE  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS.  71 

instruments  can  fail  to  weigh  heavily  upon  the  freedom  of  the 
will  in  all  the  manifestations  of  its  energy,  or  what  ad- 
vantage it  is  to  have  a  freewill  which  cannot  ever  manifest 
itself  freely  ;  or  how  we  contrive  entirely  to  escape  from  the 
entangling  fetters  of  the  inadequate  instrument  when  we  get 
the  self-conscious  intuition  of  its  absolute  freedom. 


SECTION  V. 

THE    PHYSICAL    BASIS    OF   CONSCIOUS   IDENTITY. 

Theee  is  hardly  any  one  to  he  met  with  now-a-days  who  holds 
strictly  and  consistently  to  the  belief  that  mind  can  work  in 
the  exercise  of  its  function  without  a  brain,  at  any  rate  in 
this  world.  While  making  this  general  concession,  however, 
many  people  do  actually  in  their  inmost  minds,  if  not  in 
outward  declaration,  make  reservation  or  exception  of  the 
particular  functions  of  will ;  or  rather  perhaps,  as  with  many 
persons  is  not  unusual,  believe  vaguely  the  general  proposi- 
tion and  the  particular  contradiction  at  the  same  time, 
without  acknowledging  or  even  perceiving  any  inconsistency 
in  themselves.  Some  of  them,  if  they  were  pressed  closely 
to  answer  definitely  and  lucidly  concerning  a  matter  which 
they  prefer  to  leave  hazy  and  indefinite,  might  admit  that 
the  power  of  choosing,  in  which  lies  the  freedom  of  will,  goes 
along  with  some  sort  of  cerebral  action,  antecedent,  contem- 
poraneous, or  instantly  sequent.  That  knowledge  is  not  got 
by^introspection ;  for  consciousness,  which  cannot  even  tell 
us  that  we  have  a  brain,  is  certainly  not  capable  of  making 
known  the  different  brain-changes  that  go  along  with  its 
manifold  affections.  If  emotio  mentis  means  commotio  cerebri, 
as  we  have  the  best  reason  to  believe  it  does,  the  emotion 
itself  does  not  give  the  least  hint  of  the  cerebral  agitation 
though  other  bodily  disturbances  do.  From,  the  commotion 
of  feeling  itself  we  could  not  derive  the  smallest  suspicion 
of  a  subjacent  molecular  explosion. 


72  WILL  m  ITS  HIETAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

The  odd  thing  is  that  from  this  admitted  incompetence  of 
consciousness  to  testify  concerning  what  it  is  not  its  function 
to  observe,  we  are  required  to  draw  the  nowise  legitimate 
conclusion  of  its  essential  independence  of  brain.  Instead  of 
drawing  what  seems  the  sober  and  natural  conclusion  that 
consciousness  has  no  authority  to  declare  whether  its  states 
are  the  consequences  of  brain-states  or  not — as  they  clearly 
may  be  for  anything  it  has  to  say  one  way  or  the  other  in  the 
matter — we  are  to  see  in  its  ignorance  the  absolute  certitude 
that  they  are  not ;  not  otherwise  than  as  if  we  were  asked  to 
accept  from  a  man  without  smell  the  testimony  that  a  rose 
was  scentless,  or  to  be  satisfied  with  the  evidence  of  a  person 
who  should  declare  that  the  rose  had  no  smell  because  he 
could  not  see  its  perfume,  or  protest  that  it  was  not  red 
because  he  could  not  smell  its  colour.  As  the  inquirer  tests 
the  authority  of  the  man  without  smell  by  comparing  it  with 
the  testimonies  of  other  persons  who  can  smell,  and  so  proves 
the  failure  to  be  not  in  the  rose  but  in  him ;  and  as  he  tests 
the  evidence  or  want  of  evidence  of  one  sense  by  comparing 
it  with  the  evidence  of  other  senses ;  so  he  should  test  the 
authority  of  introspective  consciousness  by  comparing  it  with 
the  evidence  of  those  other  methods  of  observation  which 
have  convinced  him  that  he  has  a  brain  and  that  changes  in 
it  move  parallel  with  changes  of  consciousness.  It  may 
come  to  pass  in  the  process  of  time  that  these  intimate  and 
hidden  workings  of  the  brain  shall  be  watched  from  without, 
and  their  exact  correspondences  with  changes  of  thought 
and  feeling  noted,  and  they  perhaps  measured  by  some 
exceeding  delicate  psychometer;  but  even  when  that  has 
come  to  pass,  if  it  ever  do — when  that  which  appeals  now 
secretly  to  consciousness  is  then  known  openly  to  sense — 
consciousness  will  still  be  as  far  as  ever  from  giving  the  least 
hint  of  them.  That  fact  will  not  be  superadded  testimony 
to  its  independence  of  matter  and  to  its  spiritual  sufficiency; 
it  will  only  add  to  the  strength  of  the  proof  of  its  incom- 
petence as  a  witness  in  the  matter. 

Let  it  be  granted,  for  the  sake  of  the  argument,  that 
consciousness  is  in  some  unknown  way  the  direct  effect  of 
intimate  cerebral  action,  one  could  not  then  logically  expect 


THE  PHYSICAL  BASIS  OF  CONSCIOUS  IDENTITY.  73 

it  to  reveal  and  declare  by  direct  intuition  the  material  energy 
tLat  caused  it.  For  what  else  would  that  be  but  to  demand 
that  consciousness  should  in  the  moment  of  intuition  be  itself 
and  its  molecular  antecedents — the  effect  and  the  cause  at 
one  and  the  same  instant  ?  Consciousness  lives  only  in  the 
instant  and  cannot  go  back  in  direct  intuition  to  its  most 
proximate  antecedent;  and  to  go  back  to  its  material  ante- 
cedent would  be  to  go  back  to  that  which  is  not  it,  but  its 
cause.  Like  a  muscular  contraction,  which  is  a  series  of 
shocks  or  waves  following  one  another  so  rapidly  as  to  appear 
continuous,  consciousness  is  a  series  of  instants  of  con- 
sciousness so  rapid  as  to  seem  continuous.  Its  failure  to 
testify  in  that  matter  is  no  more  proof  of  its  independence 
of  material  cause  than  the  failure  of  an  individual's  self- 
consciousness  to  reveal  to  him  that  his  self  is  anywise  de- 
pendent upon  a  grandfather  is  proof  that  he  could  ever  have 
come  into  being  without  a  grandfather.  Already  it  has 
been  shown  that  the  first  obscure  sentiment  that  any  one 
experiences,  the  most  primitive  manifestation  of  his  con- 
sciousness, whatever  that  be,  presupposes  in  the  constitu- 
tional structure  of  his  body  all  humanity  that  has  gone 
before :  does  self-consciousness  tell  him  aught  of  that  mo- 
mentous experience  or  even  give  the  smallest  hint  of  it? 

When  we  experience  a  state  of  consciousness  tbat  we  are 
not  able  to  refer  to  an  exciting  cause,  as  we  refer  the  sensa- 
tion of  sound  to  the  external  body,  we  invent  a  faculty  as 
the  cause  of  it ;  for  example,  when  we  feel  an  emotion,  we 
are  conscious  of  no  material  cause  of  it,  and  we  accordingly 
imagine  an  emotional  faculty  as  part  of  the  furniture  of 
mind,  as  we  in  like  manner  refer  an  outcoming  volition  to  a 
faculty  of  will.  All  the  while  there  are  perhaps  sufficient 
physical  antecedents  of  the  emotion  and  will  in  the  states  of 
the  internal  organs  of  the  body  that  are  hidden  from  us ; 
but  having  no  perceptions  of  these  organic  affections,  we 
please  ourselves  with  the  mental  faculties  which  we  create  and 
put  in  their  places.  There  is  no  one  who  does  not  think 
a  smell  or  a  taste  to  be  more  essentially  subjective,  more 
intimately  mental,  than  a  sight  or  sound,  because  its  cause 
is  less  gross  and  palpable,  more  subtile  and  latent ;  indeed. 


74  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

SO  seemingly  objective  are  the  latter  senses  that  had  we 
possessed  them  only,  and  no  higher  mental  life  than  the 
sensations  which  they  furnish,  it  muy  be  questioned  whether 
we  should  ever  have  felt  the  need  of  inventing  a  spiritual 
mind  at  all.  We  know  well  now,  however,  that  taste  and 
smell  are  not  more  specially  mental  than  sight  and  sound, 
because  we  have  convinced  ourselves  by  more  exact  observa- 
tions and  larger  experience  that  the  sensations  have  their 
objective  causes  in  the  properties  of  special  material 
substances.  There  remains  to  be  done  a  like  useful 
service  for  emotion  and  will :  a  service  not  to  be  successfully 
done  for  a  long  time  to  come — first,  because  they  are  rooted 
in  the  organic  life,  the  intimate,  intricate,  and  manifold 
affections  of  which,  and  their  essential  relations  with  cerebral 
functions,  are  hardly  known  at  all ;  secondly,  because  the 
conditions  of  emotional  sensibility  in  the  brain,  the  different 
categories  or  forms  of  human  feeling  and  will,  represent  the 
structuralised  experiences  of  an  indefinitely  long  line  of 
ancestors ;  and,  thirdly,  because  in  accordance  with  that  fact 
their  natural  stimuli  are  social,  in  any  and  every  emotion 
the  energies  of  a  complex  social  involution  in  structure  being 
unlocked  by  the  fitting  social  stimulus.  As  we  now  perceive 
plainly  that  the  uniformities  of  our  notions  of  the  external 
world  are  due  to  the  uniform  operations  of  our  senses,  so 
when  we  have  attained  to  an  accurate  and  exact  knowledge 
of  the  material  substrata  of  thought,  feeling,  and  will,  we 
shall  perceive  plainly  that  the  uniformities  of  our  feelings 
and  passions  are  due  to  the  uniform  operations  of  the 
internal  organs  of  the  body  upon  the  historically  structu- 
ralised brain. 

Meanwhile,  the  immediately  urgent  business  of  the 
serious  and  practical  student  of  mind  is  to  betake  himself 
diligently  to  an  earnest  study  of  the  body,  in  order  to  get 
clear  and  distinct  conceptions  of  what  it  is  organically,  and 
what  it  can  do  and  does  habitually  as  an  organic  machine 
without  extraneous  help.  Let  him  be  as  metaphysically 
minded  as  he  will,  his  proper  course  is  to  undertake  this 
pre-essential  enterprise,  postponing  to  its  thorough  accom- 
plishment the  more  aspiring  studies  of  those  things  that  are 


THE  PHYSICAL  BASIS  OF  CONSCIOUS  IDENTITY.  75 

assumed  to  be  beyond  the  capacities  of  physical  agencies. 
Proceeding  in  that  way  to  the  study  of  the  body  with 
frank  and  open  mind,  he  perceives  that  it  is  a  physiological 
unity  ;  that  the  essential  principle  of  its  being  and  function 
is  a  principle  of  individuation ;  that  it  is  in  fact  unit  and 
individual,  an  ego.  It  is  the  most  perfect  example  in  nature 
of  an  intimate  and  essential  correlation  of  manifold  diverse 
parts  working  together  in  the  unity  of  the  whole.  There  is 
no  need  then  to  rush  to  the  conclusion  that  in  the  self- 
consciousness  of  the  ego  he  has  an  intuitive  revelation  which 
excludes  the  possibility  of  a  physical  basis,  lest  haply  he 
should  otherwise  be  left  without  resource  for  his  belief  in 
the  ego.  He  perceives  next  that  the  physiological  unity, 
although  changing  its  particles  day  by  day  and  continually 
taking  new  developments  in  new  circumstances,  keeps  its 
identity  as  long  as  it  lives ;  unlike  as  it  may  be  at  fifty 
years  of  age  that  which  it  was  at  five  years  of  age,  it  is  yet 
at  fifty  the  development  of  that  wliich  it  was  at  five,  and 
bears  in  its  nature  ineffaceable  traces  of  its  sufferings  and 
doings  at  that  early  period.  It  represents  a  principle  of 
continuity  or  filiation,  whereby  the  present  is  a  development 
of  the  past,  and  not  of  the  past  of  the  individual  only,  but 
of  the  past  of  the  kind  ;  for  he  is  not  merely  one,  but  one 
with  his  kind,  co-member  with  others  of  a  common  social 
body  and  all  members  one  of  another.  Why,  then,  the  hot 
haste  to  ascribe  the  consciousness  of  continuity  to  an 
intuition  of  identity  which  excludes  the  possibility  of  a 
physical  basis  and  necessitates  the  instant  appeal  to  an 
immaterial  entity  ?  Self-consciousness  shows  itself  in  a  bad 
way  here ;  for,  isolating  the  individual  mind  as  it  needs  must 
by  its  method,  it  breaks  actual  continuity  with  the  past, 
yields  no  explanation  of  the  inborn  lines  of  thought  and 
feeling,  and  shuts  out  all  opening  for  any  such  inquiry. 
Were  its  method  sufficient,  the  individual  would  have  to  be 
studied  as  a  thing  apart,  having  no  connection  with  the 
past,  no  portion  in  the  future ;  but  as  he  does  not  thus  stand 
apart  in  nature,  but  has  a  part  in  it,  we  may  without  exag- 
geration say  that  the  more  self-sufficient  it  is  as  a  method, 
the  more  inefficient  it  necessarily  is. 


76  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

Are  not,  in  trutli,  the  individual's  conscious  memories  of 
his  affections  and  acts  far  less  complete  and  stable  than  the 
organism's  registered  memories  of  its  affections  and  acts? 
The  former  are  transient  and  may  be  effaced,  the  latter  are 
fixed  and  well-nigh  ineffaceable.      If  identity  had  no  better 
foundation  than   conscious  memory,  there  is   no   one   who 
would  not  lose  continuous  consciousness  of  it  before  he  was 
thirty   years  old.     Who   in   ripe   manhood  could  persuade 
himself  that  he  was  the  same  self  as  when  he  was  a  little 
child,  were  his  self-consciousness  the  only  witness  ?   To  recall 
to  mind  my  sentiments,  inclinations,  and  opinions  at  different 
epochs  of  life — so  far  as  that  is  possible — remembering  how 
weU  they  pleased  me  at  the  time,  and,  comparing  them  with 
my  present  very   different  sentiments  and  inclinations,  to 
reflect  how  ill  they  would  please  me  now,  must  be  to  convince 
me  that  my  present  self  is  more  unlike  my  former  self  than 
different  persons  are  unlike  each  other ;  indeed,  to  imagine 
myself  confronted   with  myself  at  each  of  these  different 
epochs  would  be  to  be  confronted  with  so  many  individuals 
with  whom  I  had  little   or  no  sympathy,  nay  perhaps  to 
be  actually  affronted  by  them  if  they  made  a  claim  of  near 
relationship ;  and  in  the  end  I  must  needs  feel  very  much 
obliged  to  my  body  for  enabling  me  to  preserve  the  conviction 
of  my  identity.    I  am  only  sure  that  I  am  myself  by  going  back 
in  memory  through  the  succession  of  experiences  which  it 
has   had  in  different  situations  and  circumstances,  and  by 
linking  together  its  pursuits,  fortunes,  and  adventures.     The 
consequence  is  that  when  I  return  after  many  years  to  visit 
a  place  in  which  a  considerable  part  of  my  life  was  spent,  I 
cannot  realise  how  I  felt  and  acted  there,  and  can  hardly  realise 
that  I  ever  lived  there ;  the  piece  of  history  seems  to  want 
reality,  to  be  very  much  like  a  dream ;  and  the  reason  is  that  I 
am  so  much  changed  and  that  my  changed  identity  cannot 
identify  itself  with  the  unchanged  identity  of  the  place.  _I 
am  dependent  really  upon  my  memory  of  events  and  circum- 
stances, and  I  go  back  to  the  past  scene  therefore,  not  with 
the  direct  and  vivid  certainty  of  an  intuitive  consciousness,  but 
with  the  dim  and  discontinuous  consciousness  with  which  I 
go"  back  to  a   dream.     Disease  may  sweep  clean  away  my 


THE  PHYSICAL  BASIS  OE  CONSCIOUS  IDENTITY.  77 

consciousness  of  identity,  notwithstanding  that,  though 
changed,  I  still  am. 

If  any  one  chooses  to  assure  me  that  not  a  single  particle 
of  my  body  is  what  it  was  thirty  years  ago,  and  that  its  form 
has  entirely  changed  since  then ;  that  it  is  absurd  therefore 
to  speak  of  its  identity ;  and  that  it  is  absolutely  necessary  to 
suppose  it  to  be  inhabited  by  an  immaterial  entity  which  holds 
fast  the  personal  identity  amidst  the  shifting  changes  and 
chances  of  structure  : — I  answer  him  that  other  people  "who 
have  known  me  from  my  youth  upwards,  but  have  not  my 
self-conscious  certainty  of  identity,  are  nevertheless  as 
much  convinced  of  it  as  I  am,  and  would  be  equally  sure  of 
it  even  if,  deeming  me  the  greatest  liar  in  the  world,  they 
did  not  believe  a  word  of  my  subjective  testimony ;  that 
they  are  equally  convinced  of  the  personal  identities  of  their 
dogs  and  horses  whose  self-conscious  testimony  goes  for 
nothing  in  the  matter ;  and  lastly,  that  admitting  an  imma- 
terial substance  in  me  it  must  be  admitted  to  have  gone 
through  so  many  changes  that  T  am  not  sure  the  least 
immaterial  particle  of  it  is  Avhat  it  was  thirty  years  ago ; 
that  with  the  best  intention  in  the  world  therefore  I  see  not 
the  least  need  of,  nor  get  the  least  benefit  from,  the  assumed 
and  seemingly  superfluous  entity.  It  might  indeed  be  right 
to  go  further,  and  in  turn  to  assure  him  that  his  intuition 
of  identity  is  really  the  explicit  declaration  of  its  physio- 
logical unity  and  identity  which  his  body  makes  in  con- 
sciousness ;  and  that  to  attribute  to  the  mere  translator  the 
credit  and  authority  of  author,  to  the  transcript  the  authority 
of  the  original,  is  to  make  a  singularly  ungrateful  return  for 
what  he  owes  to  the  body. 

Those  who  speak  of  mind  and  consciousness  as  co-exten- 
sive and  yet  not  having  extension,  as  their  wont  is,  and  treat 
the  notion  of  unconscious  mind  as  a  gross  absurdity,  should 
soberly  explain  where,  during  a  particular  conscious  state, 
all  the  rest  of  the  mind  is ;  where  in  fact  all  that  furniture 
beyond  the  particular  piece  then  in  use  is  stored.  Here  is 
something  that  does  not  occupy  space,  that  exists  only  so 
far  as  it  is  conscious,  and  which  nevertheless  on  any  occasion 
has  not  so  much  as  the  thousandth  part  of  its  being  in  con- 


78  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

scious  activity.  Where  is  the  non-active  part  of  its  being? 
Is  it  for  the  time  being  not  in  existence  because  it  is  not  in 
consciousness  ?  Well  might  they  say  with  St  Augustine, 
if  they  reflected  as  closely  as  he  did  upon  the  wonders  of 
memory — '  Therefore  is  the  mind  too  strait  to  contain  itself. 
And  where  should  that  be  which  containeth  not  itself?  Is 
it  without  it,  and  not  within  ?  how  then  doth  it  not  com- 
prehend itself? ' 

The  abstract  notion  of  a  metaphysical  identity  has  para- 
lysed positive  observation  and  occasioned  an  almost  entire 
neglect  of  the  concrete  facts  as  they  bear  ujDon  the  subject 
of  personal  identity;  patent  as  the  day,  they  have  been  as 
unseen  as  the  stars  when  the  sun  is  bright.  The  entity  in- 
voked, there  was  an  end  of  question  and  inquiry ;  even  curi- 
osity was  unborn  and  belief  unquestioning,  as  from  of  old 
belief  has  always  been  most  unquestioning  in  those  domains 
of  mystery  which  inquiry  and  question  might  not  enter, 
where  they  were  not  even  conceived  as  possible.  Recoiling 
from  the  danger  of  intruding  upon  sacred  ground,  and  from 
the  hardly  less  deterrent  dijB&culty  of  resolutely  forming  clear 
and  definite  ideas  and  expressing  them  in  exact  terms  and 
phrases,  men  have  persistently  dealt  with  words  instead  of 
things,  and  with  words  as  things.  Had  I  the  constant  in- 
tuitive feeling  of  being  the  same,,  as  I  am  metaphysically  re- 
quired to  have,  I  should  not  know  that  I  was  the  same,  any 
more  than  a  person  who  lived  always  in  one  sensation  could 
know  that  he  had  a  sensation ;  for  is  it  not  by  feeling  the 
changes  or  differences  in  myself  that  I  know  that  I  have  a 
foundation  of  sameness — that  I  mark  a  continuity  of  de- 
velopment ? 

To  say  that  memory  has  registered  the  successions  of 
changes  so  that  I  am  able  to  recur  to  them  by  its  means, 
is  not  to  make  the  smallest  step  forward  in  actual  know- 
ledge; it  is  merely  to  transform  a  descriptive  name  into 
a  faculty,  and  then  to  proceed  to  conjure  with  it.  It  is  the 
body  which  registers  the  changes  in  its  structure,  not  any 
abstract  memory-entity,  and  the  recurrence  of  the  acti- 
vities in  it  is  memory.  It  is  no  exaggeration  to  say  that 
the  memory  of  a  series  of  events  is  never  quite  accurate  and 


THE  PHYSICAL  BASIS  OF  CONSCIOUS  IDENTITY.  79 

never  exactly  tlie  same  on  two  occasions,  for  the  condition  of 
self  at  the  time  of  the  recurrence  in  memory  tinctures  deeply 
the  colours  or  qualities  of  the  remembrance :  the  exact  and 
perfect  memory  it  is  impossible  to  have.  How  deep  and  far- 
reaching  too  these  changes  of  self!  When  a  person  minded 
to  write  a  biography  of  himself  sits  down  in  mature  age  to 
describe  the  events  and  feelings  and  circumstances  of  his 
childhood,  it  is  a  romance,  not  a  history,  that  he  really  com- 
poses ;  as  he  himself  plainly  perceives  if,  after  he  has  done 
his  work,  he  chance  to  have  the  opportunity  of  comparing 
his  story  of  the  sorrows  or  joys  of  some  important  event  in 
his  career  with  a  particular  record  of  it  written  by  himself 
at  the  time.  Inflamed  with  the  fire  of  youth,  the  individual 
walks  with  head  erect,  confident  and  cheerfully  defying  des- 
tiny ;  sobered  and  saddened  by  experience  and  age,  the  same 
individual  bows  in  mind  and  body  under  it.  Naturally, 
therefore,  is  the  sentiment  of  freewill  much  stronger  in 
youth  and  vigour  than  in  age  and  feebleness ;  for  the  desire 
to  assert  the  self  as  against  other  selves  and  things,  which  is 
the  essence  of  the  sentiment,  is  no  other  than  the  self-con- 
servative instinct  of  life  in  its  highest  conscious  expression ; 
passionate  and  confident  therefore  in  youth,  more  deliberate 
and  diffident  in  age.  Whoso  is  suffering  pain  has  a  less  vivid 
sentiment  of  freewill  than  he  has  when  he  is  enjoying  plea- 
sure, for  in  the  one  case  he  is  undergoing  a  repression,  in 
the  other  case  an  expansion,  of  self.  See,  again,  how  great 
a  transformation  of  the  ego  is  produced  by  the  oppression  of 
disease  !  He  whose  brain  is  exhausted  by  overwork  becomes 
impatient,  irritable,  acrid,  and  above  all  things  wishful  for 
rest.  At  the  same  time,  his  tastes,  sentiments,  judgments, 
and  volitions  are  changed:  he  takes  no  pleasure  in  that 
which  formerly  and  ordinarily  gave  him  pleasure ;  is  critical, 
captious,  and  full  of  offence ;  has  no  confidence  in  his  own 
judgments,  which  it  is  a  pain  to  him  to  form,  and  well-nigh 
an  impossibility  to  express ;  feels  no  animation  of  hope  or 
aim,  and  is  destitute  alike  of  energy  to  wish  or  will.  His 
friends  who  know  him  well,  seeing  that  he  is  no  longer 
himself,  make  allowance  for  him,  not  minding  what  he  says 
when  he  speaks  bitterly  to  them ;  and  he  himself,  when  he 


80  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

recovers  from  his  prostration,  looks  back  in  shame  and  amaze- 
ment on  the  transformed  being  that  he  was. 

The  ego  is  not  a  constant  but  a  variable.  It  represents 
the  aggregate  of  sensations  clearly  or  obscurely  felt  at  any 
given  moment,  whether  springing  from  the  original  consti- 
tution or  from  the  acquired  nature  and  habits  of  the  organ- 
ism ;  these  sensations  themselves  representing  the  sum  of 
silent  multitudes  of  activities  that  are  going  on  below  the 
threshold  of  consciousness,  and  which,  albeit  unperceived 
and  unfelt  immediately,  vibrate  subtilely  in  the  most  intimate 
and  intricate  interactions  of  organic  depths,  and  in  the  rfesult 
affect  deeply  the  tone  of  consciousness.  One  may  take  leave 
to  doubt  whether  the  holiest  saint  could  preserve  in  his  de- 
votion the  most  serene  and  sacred  tone  of  spiritual  feeling, 
if  one  or  two  of  his  disordered  viscera  were  propagating  act- 
ively a  succession  of  discordant  vibrations  to  their  represent- 
ative territories  in  the  brain,  or  whether  the  most  subtile 
and  exalted  intuition  of  consciousness  into  the  mysteries  of 
the  inner  being  could  triumph  over  the  discordant  jars  of  a 
deranged  liver.  When  the  aggregate  of  vibrations  that  are 
distinctly  above  the  threshold  of  consciousness  is  in  harmony 
with  the  whole  of  the  multitudinous  vibrations  at  and  below 
the  threshold — when  the  sti'ings,  so  to  speak,  of  all  the  in- 
struments of  the  orchestra,  both  of  the  players  in  sight  and 
of  the  players  out  of  sight,  are  in  unison — then  the  ego  is 
whole,  complete,  harmonious.  On  the  other  hand,  when 
that  is  not  so,  when  the  illumined  energies  are  not  in  har- 
mony with  the  unillumined  energies,  the  present  state  with 
the  character,  or  when  some  especial  discord  prevails  in  the 
orchestra,  then  the  ego  is  incomplete,  partial,  discordant; 
the  individual  not  at  one  with  himself.  Introspection  itself, 
had  it  been  thorough  and  faithful,  might  have  opened  this 
field  of  inquiry,  but  here  again  the  all-safl&cient  abstract  ego 
stood  like  a  forbidding  angel  in  the  way  of  patient  and  plod- 
ding inquiry,  and  precluded  all  fruitful  study  of  the  nature 
and  affections  of  the  real  ego. 

It  is  a  favourite  axiom  of  the  metaphysician  that  the  ego 
has  not  extension  and  is  not  divisible,  its  definition  being 
made  out  of  blank  negations  of  these   positive   qualities; 


THE  PHYSICAL  BASIS  OF  CONSCIOUS  IDENTITY.  81 

but  it  is  an  axiom  whicli  after  all  is  confronted,  if  not  confuted, 
by  evidence  "which,  goes  far  to  show,  if  we  examine  it  fairly, 
that  the  ego  has  extension  and  is  divisible.  Here,  indeed, 
may  be  noted  a  very  pretty  inconsistency  on  his  part :  while 
telling  us  that  space  is  essentially  a  form  of  thought,  innate 
in  the  ego,  he  assures  us  in  the  same  breath  that  the  ego 
has  not  extension  ;  in  other  words,  that  which  has  not  ex- 
tension thinks  extension  by  virtue  of  its  innate  form.  Mean- 
while may  it  not  actually  be  because  the  ego  has  extension 
that  it  can  and  does  think  space  in  every  act  of  consciousness 
— in  every  thought  and  feeling,  as  well  as  in  every  percep- 
tion— and  that,  as  will  be  seen  later,  it  is  capable  of  disinte- 
gration by  disease  ?  Another  consideration :  Those  who 
protest  so  much  that  mind  has  not  extension,  would  do  well 
to  explain  clearly  whether  every  sensation,  as  such,  is  not  a 
function  of  pure  consciousness.  It  is  impossible  for  them 
seriously  to  dispute  it.  But  it  is  certain  that  every  sensation 
takes  place  through  an  extended  part  of  the  body,  and 
though  not  itself  material,  is  quantitative  and  qualitative ; 
that  it  must  have  that  foundation  in  extension,  and  be  felt 
somewhere  in  definite,  even  measurable  degree,  and  of 
definite  quality.  Here,  then,  we  have  mind  in  its  capacity  of 
sensation  taking  on  the  qualities  of  extension.  Lastly,  let 
us  consider  this  :  That  the  moment  an  individual  has  said  to 
himself  I — whether  as  I  feel,  or  as  I  think,  or  I  am — he  has 
enunciated  his  own  limitation.  The  very  consciousness  of 
the  ego  is  the  betrayal  of  its  limitation  in  time  and  space, 
and  the  proof  of  its  extension ;  for  it  is  impossible  for  him 
to  say  I  without  positing  a  non-ego  from  which,  he  is  defined 
by  limitation.  So  it  turns  out  that  the  fundamental  fact  of 
consciousness  is  itself  the  most  absolute  declaration  that  the 
ego  has  extension.  Certainly,  if  that  be  so,  it  will  not  lessen 
the  trouble  of  comprehending  how  the  finite,  having  form 
and  occupying  space,  can  declare  itself  to  be  made  in  the 
image  of  the  Infinite,  which  is  without  form  and  does  not 
occupy  space. 

Our  introspective  psychologist  of  the  study,  who  specu- 
lates at  his  ease  about  an  abstract  will  that  has  only  a 
notional  existence,  which  accommodates  itself  pliantly  to  his 


82  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

needs  and  moods  of  thought;  meddling  not  with  the  various, 
far  from  readily  conforming,  concrete  volitions  that  are  the 
real  existences  with  wnich  practical  psychologists  and  men 
of  the  world  have  to  do ;  cannot  ever  be  brought  to  apprehend 
adequately  the  divers  insensible  conditions  of  body  that 
make  themselves  felt  as  essential  elements  in  the  feelings, 
judgments  and  volitions  of  the  individual.  Could  he  do  so, 
he  would  not  fail  to  perceive  that  suicide  and  self-sacrifice 
are  equally  instances  of  a  person's  doing  that  which  pleases 
him  at  the  time  ;  that  which,  being  most  agreeable  to  or 
agreeing  most  with  the  then  inclinations  of  his  nature,  seems 
to  him  best  to  choose.  '  Did  ever  any  one,'  asks  Bishop 
Butler,  *  act  otherwise  than  as  he  pleased  ? '  ^  On  different 
occasions  I  have  talked  freely  and  argued  vainly  with  persons 
•who,  entertaining  the  notion  of  suicide,  have  subsequently 
caiTied  it  into  effect,  some  of  them  having  gone  through  a 
vast  amount  of  previous  suffering  in  their  struggles  to  with- 
stand the  deep  inclinations  of  their  natures ;  and  I  have  not 
seen  reason  to  entertain  the  least  doubt  that,  in  yielding 
obedience  thereto,  they  acted  otherwise  than  as  they  pleased. 
You  will  say  perhaps  that  they  were  mad  and  not  therefore 
to  be  reckoned  valid  and  useful  instances.  To  that  I  answer 
that,  even  if  they  were  mad,  they  were  not  on  that  account 
outside  the  range  of  a  philosophy  whose  stern  concern  is 
with  the  solidities  of  facts  :  secondly,  that,  so  far  from  being 
mad,  some  of  them  were  as  calm,  cool  and  rational  as  any  one 
I  ever  talked  with ;  too  rational  in  fact,  having  too  great  a 
preponderance  of  intellect  over  desire  to  live  happily  in 
illusion  :  lastly,  that  those  of  them  who  were  mad  afforded 
by  their  disorder  the  best  proofs  of  the  determination  of  the 
likings  and  volitions  by  bodily  causes. 

In  the  full  strength  of  buoyant  health  and  bodily  energy 
a  person  delights  in  active  exercise,  even  when  he  has  no 
other  purpose  in  the  exercise  than  the  expenditure  of  energy  ; 
he  is  sure  he  is  making  a  free  choice,  because  he  is  doing  that 
which  his  organisation  prompts  most  strongly  and  has  most 
pleasure  in.  What  more  repugnant  to  him  then,  more  sad- 
dening, than  the  thoughts  of  inactivity  and  death  ?  But  why 
•  In  his  second  sermon  on  '  Human  Nature.' 


THE  PHYSICAL  BASIS  OF  CONSCIOUS  IDENTITY.  83 

is  he  not  disquieted  and  sad  because  lie  cannot  flj,  which 
would  plainly  be  the  freest  and  best  exercise  if  he  could  take 
it?  Indeed,  we  may  well  imagine  the  eagle,  as  it  wings  its 
swift  way  high  in  the  heavens,  and  discerns  with  piercing 
eye,  itself  invisible  to  them,  the  little  creatures  creeping 
painfully  about  on  the  ground  far  below  it,  being  struck  with 
a  wondering  pity  for  them,  or  with  pitying  wonder  that  they 
can  have  a  sufficient  sense  of  pleasure  to  go  on  living  in  so 
sadly  maimed  a  way.  Man's  body  not  having  been  so  con- 
stituted as  to  enable  him  to  fly  does  not  inspire  his  mind 
with  the  desire  to  fly,  and  accordingly  he  envies  not  the 
eagle,  nor  ever  thinks  his  freedom  of  will  thwarted  because 
he  cannot  choose  or  will  to  fly.  Nor  does  he  disquiet  himself 
in  vain  because  he  has  not  a  third  eye  at  the  back  of  his 
head,  although  he  would  manifestly  see  a  great  deal  more  of 
the  world  if  he  had  it.  In  all  things,  great  and  small,  his 
desires  and  volitions  bear  the  impress  and  limitations  of  his 
bodily  structure  and  state,  just  as  do  the  desires  and  volitions 
of  each  kind  of  animal.  The  tiger  would  not  wish  and  will 
to  tear  with  tooth  and  claw,  if  tooth  and  claw  were  not  con- 
stituent parts  of  it :  the  feline  structure  of  body,  animal  or 
human,  bespeaks  a  feline  nature  of  mind. 

In  the  feebleness  and  decrepitude  of  age,  in  the  hour  of 
mortal  sickness,  in  the  shadow  of  approaching  death,  how 
repugnant  the  notion  of  activity !  How  little  repugnant, 
nay  how  welcome  oftentimes,  the  idea  of  death  !  Leave  me 
at  peace,  let  me  rest,  is  the  instinctive  cry,  the  prayer  of 
the  expiring  powers.  As  the  bodily  hold  on  life  relaxes 
with  the  failure  of  the  energies  of  the  tissues,  the  mental 
hold  is  loosened  also,  until  the  near  extinction  of  life  is  the 
extinction  of  all  desire  to  live.  Aman  has  never  so  little 
\  /  appetite  for  immortality  as  when  he  is  just  putting  off  mor- 
/C  tality.  The  horror  of  death  is  not  the  horror  of  the  dying 
man  in  fear  of  his  own  annihilation,  but  the  horror  of  the 
living  friends  around  him  at  his  annihilation  for  them  ;  who, 
moreover,  being  themselves  in  full  life  and  vigour,  revolt 
instinctively  against  the  repugnant  notion  of  ceasing  to  be. 
Nothing  is  more  remarkable  than  the  complete  indifference 
to  life  commonly  evinced  at  the  near  approach  of  death  ; 


84  WILL  m  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

notliing  more  hard  to  conceive  in  tlie  full  vigour  of  life  than 
the  possibility  of  ever  being  indifferent  to  it.  The  judgment 
of  the  ego  in  each  case  is  the  bodily  judgment. 

It  is  the  first  duty  of  the  sincere  student  of  mind  to 
emancipate  himself  from  the  bad  theological  fashion  of 
despising  the  body,  and  to  endeavour  to  gain  and  hold  just 
conceptions  of  its  admirable  structure  and  functions.  There 
is  mighty  httle  nobility  in  the  spectacle  of  a  soul  scorning  its 
earthly  tenement  as  long  as  it  is  united  to  it,  and  clinging  to 
it  with  a  miserable  tenacity,  desperately  unwilling  to  leave  it, 
when  the  time  comes  for  the  inevitable  separation.  Let  him 
cease  to  be  blind  to  himself  and  to  things  as  they  are,  and 
keen-eyed  to  see  himself  as  he  is  not,  and  he  will  then  put  his 
mind  into  that  open  and  candid  disposition  in  which  he  will 
be  able  to  apprehend  things  tmly  as  they  are  and  to  reason 
rightly  of  them.  Before  all  things  let  him  undertake  a 
frank  and  searching  inquiry  into  what  the  body  can  do  by 
itself,  giving  to  purely  reflex  acts  and  instinct  their  natural 
interpretations ;  that  is  to  say,  not  reading  the  higher  into 
the  lower,  consciousness  into  reflex  function  or  mind  into 
instinct,  still  less  making  of  instinct  some  mysterious,  quasi- 
divine  impulse,  but  drawing  from  the  phenomena  of  instinct 
and  reflex  action  the  simple  and  natural  physical  lesson  of 
what  the  body  can  do,  since  that  is  what  they  do  prove ;  not 
seeking  the  first  blind  and  tentative  efforts  of  an  immaterial 
substance  in  the  operations  of  matter,  but  discovering  in  the 
functions  of  highly  organised  matter  the  beginning  of  those 
phenomena  of  intelligent  adaptation  which,  in  their  highest 
conscious  expressions,  are  thought  to  necessitate  the  hypo- 
thesis of  an  immaterial  agency.  He  may  then  perceive 
that  instinct  is  misread  and  perhaps  undervalued  in  some  of 
its  manifestations,  and  that  intelligence  is  habitually  over- 
valued in  its  essential  signification. 

Two  errors  are  in  common  vogue  in  regard  to  instinct : 
first,  that  it  never  errs ;  secondly,  that  it  never  adapts  itself 
to  changed  circumstances.  In  reality  it  does  both ;  on  the 
one  hand,  it  errs  when  in  changed  circumstances,  not 
changing  to  them,  it  performs  old  acts  that  are  obsolete, 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  it  does  sometimes  make  imperfect 


I  ^ 


'X 


X 


I)         r 

THE  PHYSICAL  BASIS  OF  CONSCIOUS  IDENTITY.  85 

and   tentative   adaptations  to   changed   circumstances.     As 
regards  intelligence  too,  it  is  quite  certain  that  nine-tentlis 
of  a  man's  daily  acts  that  were  originally  intelligent  and    ^   y 
now  seem  voluntary  are  not  really  voluntary,  but  automatic.     ]j/ 
The  same  complex  mechanism  is  used  for  their  performance, 
whether  it  be  put  in  action  by  a  command  of  the  will  or  by  a 
stimulus  of  another  sort,  as  we  observe  when  any  one  shuts 
his  eyes   voluntarily,  and  at  another  time  shuts  them  in- 
voluntarily on   the  occasion  of  a  local  irritation   or   of  a 
threatening  gesture,  and  in  a  thousand  similar  examples; 
and   therefore  it  is  that  such   actions   are   habitually  and 
tacitly  supposed  to   be   voluntary  by   one    who,    observing 
them,  thinks  of  himself  as  an  essentially  conscious  being. 
Meanwhile,  after  they  have  become  thoroughly  fixed  and         j 
habitual  they  are  not  voluntary ;  the  will  is  not  required  even        S 
to  start  them ;  the  least  excitation  will  do  that ;  the  difficulty 
indeed  sometimes  is  to  prevent  them,  the  will  being  called 
upon  to  do  so  and  perhaps  failing. 

Here  then  are  actions  precisely  alike  in  complex  and 
purposive  nature ;  we  call  them  instinctive  or  reflex,  and 
pronounce  them  to  be  bodily,  when  we  know  not  that  con- 
scious intelligence  has  preceded  them  in  the  order  of  de- 
velopment; we  think  them  something  quite  different,  and 
ascribe  them  to  an  immaterial  entity,  when  we  have  watched 
the  process  of  conscious  adaptation  that  has  gone  before 
them.  What  they  really  prove  is  this — and  it  is  the  right 
lesson  to  be  learnt  from  them — that  the  so-called  intelligent 
design  and  execution  of  an  act  neither  implies  the  existence 
of  a  pre-designing  consciousness  nor  requires  the  interven- 
tion of  any  extra-physical  agency  in  the  individual  organism ; 
that  they  are  examples  of  what  the  body  can  do  by  itself  in 
virtue  of  its  constitution  as  a  complex  organic  mechanism. 
The  unconscious  is  the  fundamental  and  active  element,  the 
conscious  the  concomitant  and  indicative ;  and  the  aim  of 
true  scientific  inquiry  must  be  to  find  out  and  set  forth  how 
much  is  essential,  and  how  much  or  how  little  the  incidental 
has  for  .its  part  in  the  functions  ;  not  to  seek  for  the  origin 
of  the  operations  of  matter  in  any  form  of  consciousness, 
with  which  they  can  notably  dispense,  but  rather  to  seek  for 


86  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

the  origin  of  consciousness  in  the  highest  operations  of 
matter,  with  which  it  notably  cannot  dispense.  At  any  rate 
this  axiom  should  sink  deep  and  be  held  fast  in  the  mind — 
that  the  purposive  nature  of  an  act  does  not  involve  of 
necessity  a  pre-designing  consciousness ;  that  matter  does 
not  get  purpose  from  consciousness,  whether  or  not  it  be 
that  consciousness  gets  it  from  matter. 

Suppose  that  the  inquirer  who  proceeds  in  this  fashion 
ends  by  ascribing  to  matter  all  the  grandeur  and  glories  of 
mind :  has  he  really  affected  in  the  least  the  moral  meaning 
of  his  own  nature  ?  He  has  glorified  and  aggrandised  the 
functions  of  matter,  and  they  in  the  end  are  just  as  mysterious 
and  incomprehensible  to  him  as  mind.  If  he  is  honest  with 
himself  he  cannot  help  confessing  that  any  conception  of 
spirit  which  he  entertains  is  either  an  indefinite  negation  of 
matter,  and  therefore  no  actual  conception  at  all,  or  really 
the  conception  of  an  exceedingly  subtilised  matter.  A 
fundamental  postulate  he  must  have,  whether  it  be  molecule 
or  mind  ;  and  it  is  a  question  of  words  rather  than  of  things 
whether  he  chooses  to  spiritualise  matter  or  to  materialise 
mind.  He  recoils  from  a  material  conception,  however 
refined,  though  it  is  in  the  order  of  all  his  other  conceptions 
of  nature,  and  clings  to  an  indefinite  spiritual  conception, 
mainly  because  of  an  instinctive  aversion  to  lose  his  conscious 
individuality ;  for  in  the  full  energy  of  conscious  life  he 
cannot  bring  himself  to  realise  the  possibility  of  its  extinc- 
tion with  the  death  of  the  body.  Nor  does  the  revolting 
and  humiliating  spectacle  of  the  corruption  of  the  body 
after  its  death,  as  it  undergoes  the  process  of  decomposi- 
tion into  simple  elements,  tend  in  any  way  to  lessen  that 
hindrance  to  a  successful  glorification  of  matter.  Meanwhile, 
there  are  not  wanting  persons  in  different  parts  of  the  earth 
— in  the  enlightened  as  well  as  in  the  dark  places  thereof — 
the  destruction  of  whose  individualities  he  can  contemplate 
with  easy  serenity,  as  there  are  doubtless  many  persons  who 
in  their  turn  can  contemplate  with  equanimity  the  future 
destruction  of  his  individuality. 


SECTION  VI. 

CONCLUDING   EEPLECTIONS. 

The  foregoing  exposition  of  some  of  the  faults  and  fallacies 
in  the  foundations  of  the  metaphysical  doctrine  of  freewill 
ought,  if  itself  sound,  to  prove  that  they  are  nowise  so  sound 
and  surely  laid  in  the  testimony  of  consciousness  as  it  has 
been  assumed  and  asserted  they  are.  In  fact  self-conscious- 
ness seems  especially  adapted  to  deceive  us  in  that  matter, 
both  in  respect  of  that  which  it  omits  to  tell  us  and  in 
respect  of  that  which  it  does  urgently  tell  us.  As  already 
explained,  its  capital  omission  is  that  it  illumines  directly 
the  results,  but  does  not  illumine  directly  the  causes,  whence 
the  natural  illusion  of  an  undetermined  will ;  its  testimony 
is  the  testimony  of  its  present  affection,  which,  however, 
actually  is  the  outcome  of  all  the  preceding  affections  of 
consciousness  experienced  by  the  individual  and  his  fore- 
fathers. In  that  which  it  does  directly  tell  us,  on  the  other 
hand,  there  is  a  singulai'ly  forcible  suggestion  of  inde- 
pendence. For  in  every  voluntary  determination  there  are 
certainly  two  elements :  the  consciousness  of  an  energy  or 
effort,  and  a  distinct  feeling  of  satisfaction  in  making  the 
effort ;  which  last  is  probably  the  expression  of  the  desire  to 
assert  self,  in  accordance  with  the  fundamental  instinct  of 
self-conservation. 

The  consciousness  of  effort  is  in  truth  a  fundamental 
fact  of  experience;  no  explanation  will  ever  enable  us  to 
get  behind  it;  it  springs  from  the  relation  of  self  to  the 
not-self,  their  opposition  and  interaction,  and  is  at  once  the 
revelation  of  their  difference  and  identity.  In  the  sense 
of  effort  there  is  involved  necessarily  a  resistance,  which  is 
the  basis  of  the  belief  of  the  non-ego.  Were  there  an 
entire  and  perfect  fitness  of  relations  between  the  ego  and 
the  non-ego,  a  complete  certitude  in  every  respect,  a  full 
and  exact  harmony,  consciousness  would  be  extinguished. 
The  consciousness  of  will  may  be  said  to  mark  the  incom- 
pleteness and  uncertainty  of  the  relations.     One  surmounts 


88  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

self  only  by  not  thinking  of  self,  coalesces  witli  nature  by  a 
complete  self-surrender  to  the  order  thereof.  Individuality 
is  a  passing  severance  from  the  larger  life  of  nature,  death- 
doomed  therefore  by  its  nature  as  a  severed  part.  Could  a 
man  bring  himself  into  complete  harmony  of  relations  with 
nature  in  every  respect,  mental  and  bodily,  identify  himself 
with  it  thoroughly,  he  might  be  immortal,  but  in  that  case 
he  would  secure  immortality  at  the  cost  of  individuality. 

The  second  constituent  element  of  volition — namely,  the 
distinct  feeling  of  satisfaction  attending  it — is  well  adapted 
to  inspire  the  individual  with  the  conviction  that  he  has 
willed  and  acted  with  perfect  freedom :  it  is  probably  the 
main  factor  in  that  illusive  consciousness.  See  how  the 
drunkard,  the  madman,  the  passionately  jealous  or  angry 
man,  let  his  conduct  be  never  so  ridiculous,  believes  himself 
to  be  acting  with  entire  freedom  so  long  as  his  mood  or 
passion  lasts  ;  he  has  at  the  moment  so  distinct  a  feeling  of 
satisfaction  in  what  he  does  that  he  never  felt  more  sure  of 
his  freedom ;  but  when  his  passion  cools  or  his  mood 
changes  he  perceives  clearly  that,  swayed  or  constrained  by 
it,  he  was  nowise  so  free  as  he  imagined.  His  gesticulations 
and  fury  were  not,  as  he  flattered  himself,  triumphs  of  re- 
sistance to  constraint  and  proud  proofs  of  his  independence, 
but  the  jubilant  contortions  of  his  passion  as  it  bore  him 
irresistibly  along  in  its  current.  If  an  angry  man  listens  at 
all  to  the  admonitions  of  prudence  and  sense  addressed  to 
him  during  the  heat  of  his  rage,  they  serve  only  to  inflame 
his  reckless  determination  to  do  as  he  likes  ;  he  rebels  against 
them  as  impertinent  attempts  to  constrain  his  freedom,  in- 
sulting and  exulting  over  them.  Let  him  think  of  them 
afterwards  when  he  is  calmer  and  clearer  in  mind,  then  he 
is  amazed  and  perhaps  ashamed  that  he  did  not  suffer  them 
to  affect  him.  But  when  appeal  is  made  from  Philip  drunk 
to  Philip  sober  the  appeal  is  to  two  different  natures  with 
different  likings ;  and  it  is  not  legitimate  to  leave  that  fact 
out  of  sight  and  to  base  an  argument  of  freedom  of  choice 
on  the  assumption  that  the  appeal  was  made  to  the  same 
natures  ;  for  assuredly  the  actuating  inward  powers — namely, 
the  force  of  passion  which  prevails  on  one  occasion,  and  the 


CONCLUDING  REFLECTIONS.  89 

force  of  prudence  which  prevails  on  the  other  —are  not  in  the 
same  proportionate  strength  on  the  two  occasions.  The 
problem  of  the  motive  elements  of  a  particular  act  of  will  is 
a  problem  of  the  particular  state  of  the  individual  at  the 
time,  not  of  his  state  a  day  or  a  month  before  or  a  day  or  a 
month  after ;  not  even  of  his  state  a  few  minutes  before  or 
after,  if  there  has  happened  meanwhile  the  pain  of  a  colic, 
or  the  torpor  of  a  sated  passion,  or  some  other  bodily  change 
too  mean  and  trivial  for  the  appreciation  of  high  philosophy, 
but  not  too  mean  and  ti'ivial  to  produce  far-reaching  effects 
in  the  extremely  complex,  intimately  united,  and  mobile 
elements  of  the  organism. 

In  discussing  the  motivation  of  will,  it  is  not  always  suf- 
ficiently borne  in  mind  by  those  who  advocate  its  so-called 
freedom  that  the  individual  is  a  wJiole,  compounded  not  of  a 
single  sentiment  or  passion  but  of  sevei^l  sentiments  and 
passions,  each  of  which  has  its  especial  object  and  gratifica- 
tion, and  that  in  doing  what  pleases  him  best  he  may  still 
be  doing  very  differently  at  different  times,  according  to  the 
particular  sentiment  or  passion  that  is  then  uppermost.  The 
strongest  desire  of  one  occasion  shall  not  be  the  strongest 
desire  of  another  occasion,  and  yet  it  may  remain  true 
that  the  will  follows  the  strongest  desire.  Nothing  but 
interminable  disputations,  futile  and  profitless,  will  come 
of  treating  the  matter  as  one  of  abstract  will  and  abstract 
desire.  In  order  to  be  fruitful,  the  discussion  must  leave  the 
void  of  the  abstract  and  fix  itself  upon  the  particular  will 
and  the  particular  desire.'  In  fact,  though  the  organism 
subserves  one  large  end — the  welfare  of  the  whole — there  are 
many  subsidiary  ends  included  within  this  main  one,  each  of 
which  has  its  own  desire  of,  and  pleasure  in,  fulfilment ;  a 
special  gratification,  moreover,  which  in  moderation  and  due 
subordination  is  good  in  the  particular  and  good  for  the 
whole,  but  in  over-indulgence  or  excess  is  bad  in  the  parti- 
cular and  for  the  whole.  As  many  such  ends  as  there  are,  so 
many  correspondent  wills  are  there ;  as  many  as  are  the  dif- 

•  It  is  not  in  the  multiplication  of  voluminous  systems  of  psychology, 
but  in  the  exact  scientific  exposition  of  a  single  well-studied  case  of   indi- 
vi'lual  psychology,  that  the  real  hope  of  progress  in  psychology  lies. 
7 


90  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

ferences  in  the  dignities  of  these  ends,  so  many  are  the  differ- 
ences in  the  qualities  or  dignities  of  their  several  wills. 

By  the  power  which  a  man  has  of  looking  before  and  after 
he  is  freed  from  the  necessity  of  living  in  the  present  and 
of  yielding  to  the  immediate  impulse,  as  the  infant,  the  idiot, 
and  the  lower  animals  for  the  most  part  do  ;  in  a  pai'ticular 
conjunction  of  circumstances  he  can  look  back  to  other  con- 
junctions of  circumstances,  or  in  a  particular  social  medium 
he  can  refer  back  to,  and,  in  referring,  realise  to  some  de- 
gree, other  social  mediums  experienced  by  him  personally, 
or  known  to  him  historically;  so  he,  having  a  historical 
being,  makes  the  past  present,  and  is  able  to  postpone  a 
present  pleasure  out  of  regard  to  a  future  gratification  of  the 
same  kind  or  of  a  higher  kind.  Suppose  the  case  of  one 
who,  after  some  passing  thoughts  of  resistance,  yields  reck- 
lessly to  a  present  temptation  of  sense  in  spite  of  the  gra- 
vest warnings  of  reason  and  in  clear  foresight  of  the  pain- 
ful consequences  of  his  indulgence ;  with  deliberate  will  he 
gains  his  hour  of  bliss,  though  he  knows  he  will  have  to 
suffer  a  week  of  woe  afterwards  :  shall  we  say  of  him  that  he 
is  or  is  not  acting  with  freewill  ?  Is  he  not  actually  vindi- 
cating the  freedom  of  a  lower  from  the  coercion  of  a  higher 
will  ?  What  he  does  is  to  resist  the  attempted  coercion  of 
the  higher  motives  that  press  upon  him  and  to  indulge  in  a 
reckless  freedom  of  will ;  the  very  sense  of  defiant  freedom 
which  he  has  in  his  resistance  to,  and  rebellion  against,  the 
constraint  of  higher  motive  being  the  pleasure  that  actuates 
him  and  assures  him  of  it.  He  prefers  the  easy  freedom  of 
lower  will  to  the  constrained  freedom  of  higher  will;  in 
other  words,  he  prefers  one  to  another  of  a  hundred  possible 
wills,  all  having  their  several  motives  of  determination,  that 
are  in  some  of  a  higher,  in  others  of  a  lower  order.  But 
he  is  not  free,  says  the  alarmed  moralist,  when  he  yields  to 
the  lower  motives  that  lead  him  down-hill ;  he  is  free  only 
when  he  obeys  the  higher  motives  that  lead  him  upwards, 
and  most  free  of  all  when  he  has  made  such  obedience  into 
the  servitude  of  habit.  In  that  case,  his  self-consciousness 
deceives  him  grossly,  for  it  is  certain  that  it  tells  him  and 
makes  him  believe  he  is  as  free  in  the  one  case  as  in  the 


CONCLUDING  REFLECTIONS.  91 

other ;  and  if  he  be  deceived  in  the  one,  he  may  well  be  de- 
ceived in  the  other  also.  The  moralist  who  has  come  to  the 
clear  opinion  that  liberty  and  supreme  reason  are  one — 
that  always  '  freedom  with  right  reason  dwells ' — would  not 
do  amiss  to  reflect  that,  in  reality,  no  constraint  is  more 
stern,  heavy,  and  severe  than  that  of  reason,  which,  if 
dominant,  leaves  a  person  no  choice  between  two  lines  of 
conduct ;  he  cannot  choose,  if  he  understands  them,  between 
two  mathematical  conclusions,  one  of  which  is  plainly  right 
and  the  other  plainly  wrong ;  cannot  choose,  wishing  to  live, 
whether  he  should  live  by  taking  food  or  by  doing  without 
food.  Its  command  is  not  a  capricious,  impulsive,  transient 
domination,  the  tyranny  of  an  hour,  obeyed  with  more  or  less 
pleasure,  as  that  of  passion  mostly  is,  but  a  steady,  persis- 
tent, grinding  despotism,  weighing  upon  the  individual  with 
a  dull  and  mechanical  pressure,  as  it  were,  and  enforcing 
an  obedience  that  is  attended  by  little  pleasure.  The  ques- 
tion of  freewill,  as  commonly  stated,  is  insoluble  truly,  but 
insoluble  only  because  it  has  no  meaning  when  we  cease  to 
talk  of  an  abstract  notional  will  and  begin  to  occupy  our- 
selves with  the  particular  volitions. 

Little  favour  will  these  discussions  have,  and  little  will 
they  weigh,  with  the  introspectionist,  who  in  the  end  does 
not  fail  to  fall  back  dogmatically  upon  the  direct  intuition 
of  freedom.  Always,  too,  metaphysics  is  at  hand  to  provide 
him  with  abundant  arguments  to  justify  the  intuition  ;  for 
its  sterile  perseverance  is  like  that  of  the  barren  womb 
which  never  cries  'Enough.'  As  one  might  say — I  know  that 
the  sun  goes  round  the  heavens  by  the  plain  evidence  of  sense, 
and  arguments  to  prove  the  contrary,  even  though  unanswer- 
able, will  not  shake  my  faith  in  that  positive  testimony  ;  so 
he  will  say — I  know  that  my  will  is  free,  for  I  feel  it  in  every 
volition  which  I  exert,  and  arguments  to  prove  the  contrary, 
even  though  unanswerable,  will  not  shake  my  unswerving 
faith  in  the  positive  testimony  of  my  consciousness.  If  the 
answer  be  made  unto  him.  Be  not  deceived,  it  is  not  the 
sun  wliich  goes  round  the  earth,  but  the  earth  which  goes 
round  the  sun ;  and  in  like  manner  it  is  not  you  who  are  free 
and  nature  that  is  under  necessity,  but  you  who  are  under 


92  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

necessity  and  nature  tliat  is  free ; — lie  will  protest  that  the 
answer  is  an  absurdity.  Nevertheless,  it  is  not ;  for  if  there 
be  freedom  anywhere,  it  certainly  cannot  be  in  the  conscious 
world  of  the  relative,  but  must  be  in  the  unconscious  world  of 
the  noumenal.  As  it  was  in  the  beginning  so  will  it  be  at  the 
end  of  the  argument :  he  has  so  great  a  faith  in  the  intuition 
of  freedom  that  he  will  not  doubt.  Between  what  he  wishes 
when  he  is  inclined  to  a  favourite  sin  and  his  sense  of  duty 
to  resist  the  self-gratification  he  feels  that  he  has  a  choice ; 
and  when  he  acts  from  the  higher  motive  he  pleases  and 
deludes  himself  with  the  notion  that  he  has  willed  otherwise 
than  as  he  wished,  forgetting  that  he  has  after  all  wished  to 
do  his  duty.  '  Man  always  wills  to  do  that  which  he  desires 
most,  when  he  does  not  feel  himself  obliged  by  the  sentiment 
of  duty  to  do  that  which  he  desires  less  : '  such  is  the  con- 
sistent inconsistency  of  the  freewill  doctrine,  which — to  say 
nothing  of  the  absurdity  of  making  the  desire  in  the  senti- 
ment of  duty  less  than  the  desire  which  it  overcomes — 
actually  represents  a/ree  man  as  being  obliged  to  do  what  he 
would  not  wish  to  do,  and  as  rising  to  higher  freedom  in 
proportion  as  the  constraint  of  duty  becomes  stronger.  To 
common  apprehension  does  that  not  sound  very  like  deter- 
minism 9  It  must  at  any  rate  be  deemed  a  strange  example 
of  the  emancipation  of  will  from  motive,  though  rightly 
viewed  as  an  example  of  emancipation  from  lower  motive. 
The  wishing  or  willing  of  an  end  of  any  sort  is  really  not 
consistent  with  a  conception  of  perfect  freedom  ;  it  is  at  once 
to  make  an  imperfection  of  it.  Even  God  willing  an  end 
would  be,  as  Spinoza  said,  an  incomplete  God.  A  person  can 
be  logically  free  only  when  there  is  such  a  complete  equi- 
librium between  sentiments,  passions,  and  reflections  that 
he  is  in  a  state  of  complete  indifference ;  when  he  is  not 
under  the  least  shadow  of  constraint  to  act  one  way  or  the 
other,  or  to  act  at  all ;  when  therefore  he,  properly  speaking, 
cannot  act  at  all. 

Always  in  respect  of  freewill  or  liberty  is  it  to  be  rightly 
borne  in  mind  that  the  notion  of  it,  whatever  its  intrinsic 
value,  is  helpful  against  the  pressure  of  a  particular  passion 
or  motive.     The  belief  of  its  existence  therefore  may  do  real 


CONCLUDING  KEFLECTIONS.  93 

work  in  the  mind,  even  tliough  tlie  thing  have  no  existence. 
In  its  progress  thus  far  mankind  has  owed  perhaps  more  to 
beliefs  that  have  turned  out  not  to  be  true  than  to  truths 
that  have  remained  true.     The  notion  of  freewill  becomes 
itself,  merely  as  notion,  a  centre  of  power  in  the  mind ;  it 
gives  time  for  pause  and  reflection,  when  it  is  stimulated 
to   action   through   the    accomplished   associations   on   the 
required  occasions ;  and  if  it  has  happily  been  thus  brought 
into  inhibitive  action  on  many  similar  occasions,  it  gains  the 
strength  and  ease  of  habit.    Here,  as  elsewhere,  the  conscious 
energy  of  past  function  becomes  the  unconscious  mechanism 
of  present  function,  which  thereupon  is  able  to  work  without 
attention  and  almost  without  exertion;  will  loses  its  cha- 
racter, so  to  speak,  in  attaining  to  its  unconscious  perfection ; 
and  meanwhile  the  free,  unattached  path-seeking  conscious- 
ness and  will,  that  are,  as  it  were,  the  pioneers  and  perf  ecters 
of  progress,  are  available  to  initiate  new  and  to  perfect  old 
functions.     A  passionate  person  who  has  by  patient  watch- 
fulness over  himself  and  by  a  course  of  steady  perseverance 
and  practice  accustomed  himself  to  wear  an  outward  air  of 
calmness  and  to  speak  in  quiet,  measured  language  when  he 
is  inwardly  in  a  towering  passion,  making  thus  a  clever  art 
of  his  natural  defect — as  it  is  the  part  of  wisdom  to  do  with 
all  natural  defects — succeeds  in  making  that  regulated  dis- 
charge of  energy  the  habit  of  his  life,  and  in  the  end  does  it 
quite  easily ;  so  much  so  that  nine  out  of  ten  persons  who 
have  to  do  with   him  imagine  him  to  be  a  person  of  sin- 
gularly calm  temperament.     To  him  meanwhile  thus  practis- 
ing  his   clever   art   well-nigh   automatically,  there    is   this 
advantage — that  his  consciousness  is  free  to  take  clear  and 
full   account   of  all  the   circumstances   of  the   crisis   in  a 
rapid  reflection  upon  them,  and  to  grasp  the  right  issue, 
instead  of  being  swallowed  up  in  the  torrent  of  passion. 
Here  also  the  lesson  does  not  fail  to  make  itself  evident,  that 
such  excellence  of  culture  cannot  ever  be  reached  by  a  life  of 
pure  self-inspection  and  mental  discipline  in  the  closet ;  he 
alone   can   gain  it  who  is  content  to  gain  it  by  diligent 
practice   among   men   a,nd   things,  seeking   and   using   the 
occasions  of  exercise — by  doing  not  thinking  only,  and  doing 


94  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

with  and  througli  and  for  others ;  not,  indeed,  without  feeling, 
but  with  feeling  put  into  deed  rather  than  into  display. 

If  man  must  thus  patiently  manufacture  himself  to  habits 
of  well-doing  by  the  diligent  practice  of  doing  well,  and  on 
most  occasions  perceives  good  habits  to  be  a  better  security 
of  good  conduct  than  good  principles,  what  becomes  of  the 
opinion  that  freewill  is  the  foundation  and  fountain  of  mora- 
lity? For,  next  to  the  supposed  direct  intuition  of  free- 
dom, the  postulate  of  its  moral  necessity  is  the  strongest 
pillar  of  the  doctrine.  If  man  be  not  free  to  do  well  or  ill, 
how  can  he  be  deemed  responsible  for  what  he  does?  Well; 
perhaps  his  responsibility  is  not  for  doing  what  he  does, 
being  what  he  is,  but  for  being  what  he  is.  Let  us  inquire 
a  little  further  into  the  matter.  To  deny  the  freedom  of  the 
will,  we  are  told,  is  to  make  morality  impossible.  Of  which 
crisp  and  confident  formula,  an  opponent  might  declare  that  it 
is  no  more  true  than  it  is  true  that  an  acknowledgment  of  the 
law  of  gravitation  makes  walking  impossible  ;  indeed,  might 
justly  perhaps  go  further  and  say  that  moral  responsibility 
could  no  more  coexist  with  freedom  of  will  than  a  man  could 
walk  without  the  law  of  gravitation.  Were  any  man  really 
free  he  would  be  free  from  responsibility  for  his  character, 
which  he  could  not  then  train  and  fashion ;  it  is  because  he 
is  not  free,  but  a  product  in  an  order  of  development,  that  he 
is  responsible  :  responsible  for  the  exercise  of  his  reason  to 
establish  a  mental  order.  Does  not  then  the  recognition  of 
the  reign  of  law  in  mind  actually  enlarge  and  enhance  the 
rational  conception  of  freedom,  by  bringing  home  to  the 
individual  a  sense  of  responsibility  not  for  what  he  does 
only,  but  in  some  measure  for  what  he  feels  and  thinks  and 
is  ?  And  by  bringing  home  to  one  generation  a  stem  sense 
of  responsibility  for  what  the  next  generation  shall  feel, 
think,  and  be?  For  certainly  the  circumstances  of  one 
generation  make  much  of  the  fate  of  the  next. 

It  is  hard  to  see  how  the  notion  of  responsibility  can 
possibly  attach  to  things  that  are  not  linked  to  one 
another  by  the  tie  of  causation,  and  how  without  such 
unfailing  tie  there  could  fail  to  be  chaos  instead  of  kosmos 
in  the  region  of  mind.     Assuredly  the  sense  of  responsi- 


CONCLUDINa  EEFLECTIONS.  95 

bility  is  not  founded  on  the  consciousness  of  freedom,  since 
it  exists  in  persons  who  deny  positively  the  validity  of  such 
consciousness,  and  who  moreover  argue  that  upon  that 
foundation,  even  if  it  be  accepted  as  valid,  not  responsi- 
bility but  irresponsibility  alone  can  be  based.  Rather 
perhaps  ought  we  to  say  with  Kant  that  the  categorical 
moral  imperative,  which  inwardly  commands  us  to  do  duty 
independently  of  all  external  attractions  or  distractions, 
imposes  the  conception  of  freedom ;  that  liberty  is  of  neces- 
sity involved  in  this  conception  of  obligation ;  and  that  we  are 
bound  by  such  implication  of  moral  law  to  accept  the  concept, 
even  though  but  for  it  we  should  never  have  thought  of 
freedom  in  any  department  of  knowledge.  We  are  to  take 
it  in  fact  as  the  implicate  of  a  fundamental  obligation, 
instinct  in  us,  to  do  uprightly ;  for  that  is  what  it  actually 
comes  to.  It  is  the  law  in  the  heart,  the  monitor  in  the 
bosom,  suggesting  with  urgency,  enjoining  with  power.  In 
other  words,  having  first  wrapped  up  a  principle  of  liberty 
in  our  conception  of  duty,  we  proceed  in  due  time  to  unwrap 
it,  and  having  discovered  it  where  we  put  it,  we  can  properly 
declare  that  it  was  involved  there.  On  the  one  hand,  then, 
the  freedom  of  will,  as  perceived  by  us  in  ourselves,  is 
maintained  to  be  the  basis  of  morality ;  on  the  other  hand, 
the  moral  basis  is  affirmed  to  involve  or  to  postulate  implicitly 
a  freedom  which  we  could  not  ever  have  perceived  explicitly. 
To  which  principle  is  our  homage  due  ? 

Without  denying  the  categorical  moral  imperative,  its 
supposed  implication  is  nowise  self-evident,  for  it  may  fairly 
be  argued  that  the  obligation  no  more  involves  such  a  con- 
ception of  libtsrty  as  is  assumed,  than  the  consciousness  of 
freedom  involves  morality.  It  is  because  mankind  has  felt 
dimly  and  vaguely  the  inward  imperative,  because  it  has 
been  unawares  under  that  constraint,  and  because  it  has  not 
been  free  to  go  its  own  way,  that  it  has  made  the  progress 
which  it  has  made  from  its  lower  to  its  higher  stages  of 
being.  The  implicate  of  the  moral  imperative  is  not  liberty 
but  constraint.  Hence  to  our  surprise  we  struggle  against 
passions  that  prompt  and  please  in  order  to  accomplish  duties 
that  repel,  and  are  at  first  almost  painful ;  the  lower  affini- 


96  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

ties  and  attractions  of  our  natures,  as  in  chemical  develop- 
ments, sacrificing  themselves  to  higher  affinities,  disappearing 
in  the  process,  and  by  such  sacrifice  constituting  the  higher. 
Had  man  been  left  to  follow  freely  the  bent  of  such  freewill 
as  he  has  he  would  most  likely  have  gone  the  way  of  his 
passions  to  an  unspeakable  degradation,  if  not  to  actual 
destruction.  At  bottom  that  which  we  discern  in  his  moral 
instinct  is  the  necessity  of  nature  operating  in  the  evolution 
of  the  highest  organic  matter  and  so  urging  or  compelling  it 
into  more  complex  combinations  and  functions.  Since  the 
process  is  going  on  continually  in  chemical  combinations, 
why  wonder  that  a  similar  process  takes  place  among  the 
several  passions  to  accomplish  a  moral  evolution,  and  that  it 
gives  intimation  of  itself  in  feeling  ? 

A  positive  fact  of  observation  it  is  that  the  power  of 
adaptation  to  surroundings  within  certain  limits,  intrinsically 
and  extrinsically  fixed,  is  a  property  of  all  living  organic 
matter  j  and  assuredly  this  property  belongs  to  the  highest 
evolution  of  matter,  as  it  exists  in  the  exceeding  delicate 
and  complex  organisation  of  the  human  brain,  as  well  as  to 
the  simplest  particle  of  living  protoplasm.  The  law  of 
adaptation  which  we  thus  discern  and  trace  alike  in  every 
instance  of  organic  development  and  function,  we  discern 
and  trace  also  in  the  accommodation  of  the  individual  to  his 
social  surroundings  and  in  the  consequent  modification  of  his 
character.  Let  him  cease  then  to  labour  to  know  himself  in 
himself,  and  let  him  strive  diligently  to  know  himself — as 
he  can  only,  properly  speaking,  know  himself — in  nature ; 
looking  not  for  the  source  of  any  absolute  criterion  of 
truth  or  right  in  himself,  where  he  can  never  find  more  than 
self,  but  seeking  it  in  the  common  feeling  or  instinct 
derived  from  the  large  experience  of  the  race.  Humanity, 
not  self,  is  the  true  concern  of  the  individual  who  would 
rise  to  a  higher  self. 

Here,  then,  is  made  plainly  manifest  the  duty  of  the  in- 
dividual to  place  himself  in  circumstances  of  action  in  which 
his  character  will  be  modified  for  the  better — to  do  in  order 
to  he ;  the  solemn  responsibility  under  which  he  is  to  deter- 
mine rationally  in  himself,  by  help  of  circumstances,  that 


Ui*>{|ftv. 


CONCLUDING  EEFLECTIONS.  97 

whicli  may  thereby  be  predetermined  in  his  future  conduct, 
and  in  some  measure  in  his  posterity.  If  he  has  no  living 
posterity  in  whom  thus  to  strive  to  predetermine  a  good 
manner  of  thinking  and  feeling,  any  good  work  he  does 
which  is  an  instruction,  a  joy,  a  help  to  those  who  come 
after  him,  by  awakening  them  to  sympathy  with  thoughts 
and  hopes  and  feelings  that  otherwise  they  might  have 
heeded  not,  shall  be  his  posterity.  All  which  it  will  perhaps 
be  said  is  true,  and  can  be  entirely  accepted ;  but  it  does 
not  touch  the  indisputable  fact  that  a  person  has  sometimes 
by  a  solemn  resolution  changed  the  whole  line  of  conduct  of 
his  life  immediately.  There  have  been  many  other  moral 
revolutions  like  that  which  converted  Saul  the  persecutor 
into  Paul  the  apostle.  True ;  but  will  anybody  seriously 
maintain  that  the  enthusiasm,  the  moral  energy,  the  fiery 
character,  the  strong  will,  the  intellectual  power  of  that 
apostle  were  the  pure  result  of  his  conversion  ?  Do  you 
not  find  as  decisive  evidence  of  his  daemonic  character  in  his 
epistles  and  in  the  events  of  his  apostleship  as  you  find  in 
the  energy  that  he  displayed  as  a  persecutor  ?  If  a  great 
sinner  becomes  a  great  saint,  and  the  greater  sinner  the 
greater  saint,  he  draws  his  inspiration  not  from  the  void  but 
from  his  character,  whose  energies  have  happily  now  got  a 
better  direction.  Without  question,  a  deep  moral  agitation 
produced  by  a  powerful  impression  and  reinforced  by  habitual 
recollections,  especially  when  it  is  swelled  by  the  infection  of 
like  emotion  in  many  other  persons,  will  reach  below  ordinary 
habits  of  thought  and  feeling  and  stir  the  inmost  elements  of 
character,  fusing  and  welding  them  into  new  moulds.  But 
the  material  must  be  there,  and  must  be  of  such  quality  as 
to  be  capable  of  taking  these  new  forms  or  moulds.  Always 
must  there  be  something  akin  within  to  vibrate  in  sympathy 
with  the  quality  of  the  power  without ;  if  not,  the  latter  will 
pass  like  wind.  No  motion  will  unlock  the  proper  emotion 
if  the  latter  be  not  embodied  in  mental  structure.  It  is  a 
foolish  illusion  to  believe  that  any  one  in  whose  nature  is 
neither  sincerity  nor  uprightness  will  become  upright  by 
undergoing  a  sudden  conversion ;  if  he  was  essentially  un- 
righteous before,  he  will  be  unrighteous  still,  being  only  a 


98  WILL  IN  ITS  METAPHYSICAL  ASPECT. 

hypocrite  in  addition,  consciously  or  unconsciously ;  if  sin- 
cerely upright  now,  there  was  the  basis  of  sincerity  and  up- 
rightness in  him  then :  he  was  at  least  genuine  in  his  evil 
doings.  Moreover,  to  ensure  the  permanent  utility  of  the 
new  upheaval  of  feeling,  to  establish  it  in  a  steady  and 
stable  moral  growth,  the  impression  that  caused  it  must 
have  been  so  powerful  as  to  recur  ever  after  to  the  mind 
in  vivid  force,  or  there  must  have  been  a  subjection  to  a 
succession  of  impressions  of  the  same  kind  as  it.  So  will 
be  effected  gradually  that  transformation  of  nature  whereby 
virtue  becomes  structural  habit  and  its  exercise  a  pleasure  ; 
and  that  is  the  guarantee  of  its  stability  and  permanence. 

It  is  Pascal  who,  after  pointing  out  that  those  who  quit 
the  service  of  God  to  return  to  that  of  the  world  do  so  only 
because  they  find  more  pleasure  in  the  world,  goes  on  to  say 
— *  de  meme  on  ne  quitterait  jamais  les  plaisirs  du  monde 
pour  embrasser  la  croix  de  Jesus-Christ,  si  on  ne  trouvait 
plus  de  douceur  dans  le  mepris,  dans  la  pauvrete,  dans  le 
denuement  et  dans  le  rebut  des  hommes,  que  dans  les  delices 
du  peche.  Et  aussi,  comme  dit  Tertullien,  il  ne  faut  pas 
croire  que  la  vie  des  Chretiens  soit  une  vie  de  tristesse.  On  ne 
quitte  les  plaisirs  que  pour  d^autres  plus  grands.* 


PAET  n. 

WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL,  SOCIAL,  AND    EVOLU- 
TIONAL RELATIONS. 


SECTION   I. 

ITS    PHYSIOLOGICAL   BASIS. 

Those  who^uphold  a  metaplijsical  will  protest  eagerly  tliat 
there  is  nothing  in  the  known  operations  of  matter,  even 
when  in  its  most  complex  organic  forms,  that  is  in  the  least 
like  the  energy  we  are  conscious  of  as  will,  or  can  so  much 
as  be  conceived  to  be  a  physical  basis  of  it.  They  would  do 
well,  however,  to  explain  what  exact  measure  of  meaning 
they  give  to  the  word  like  when  they  say  so.  As  it  is 
through  self-consciousness  that  we  know  the  energy  which 
jwe  call  will,  and  as  it  is  through  our  senses  that  we  know 
the  so-called  physical  forces,  it  is  plain  that  we  have  no 
right  to  expect  them  to  be  like,  as  conscious  states.  The 
effect  which  the  same  object  produces  upon  the  different 
senses  that  it  is  capable  of  affecting  is  of  course  in  each  case 
a  quite  different  conscious  state,  being  special,  nnlike  any- 
thing else,  sui  generis ;  so  much  so  that  an  object  known 
well  to  one  sense  would  be  perfectly  strange  to  another  sense 
acting  alone — the  eye  blind  to  thunder,  the  ear  deaf  to 
lightning.  If  a  person  blind  from  birth  obtains  sight  sud- 
denly by  some  happy  operation  of  surgery,  he  does  not 
recognise  at  all  by  the  eye  in  the  first  instance  an  object 
that  he  knows  well  by  touch ;  and  did  the  two  senses  not 
go  on  afterwards  to  act  together  in  the  apprehension  of  it, 
to  combine  their  results  in  perception,  it  would  always  be 


100  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

a  different  object  to  them.  Wlience  springs  a  not  unin- 
teresting reflection  :  that  if  the  several  senses  only  acted 
separately,  an  object  would  appear  to  be  as  many  objects  as 
there  were  senses  that  it  was  capable  of  affecting,  and  so, 
with  a.  dozen  things  around  him,  a  man  might  believe  himself 
to  be  living  amidst  a  great  many  objects  and  revel  in  the 
variety  of  his  existence.  Is  it  not  perhaps  actually  because 
of  the  fewness  and  the  limitations  of  his  senses  that  he 
believes  nature,  which  is  one,  to  be  so  various  as  it  seems  ? 

The  experience  of  the  outer  senses  then  entirely  contra- 
dicts the  notion  that  the  information  derived  from  self-con- 
sciousness can  be  like  that  given  by  any  of  them.  The  same 
object — the  functioning  brain — must  necessai'ily  produce  a 
very  different  impression  (if  it  produce  any)  upon  the  in- 
ternal sense  of  consciousness  from  that  which  it  produces 
upon  the  senses  of  an  observer;  the  self-conscious  state, 
that  is,  could  not  be  in  the  least  like  anything  that  we  know 
of  the  operations  of  cerebral  matter:  no  motion  of  its 
molecules,  gyratory,  undulatory,  rotatory,  nor  any  combina- 
tion of  such  motions  that  we  can  imagine,  could  have  any 
conceivable  analogy  with  a  sensation:  between  them  no 
comprehensible  relation  can  exist,  an  impassable  gulf  must 
remain  fixed.  All  which,  put  succinctly  and  plainly,  is 
simply  this :  no  physics  of  body  can  possibly  be  the  meta- 
physics of  mind.  Certainly  it  would  be  strange  enough  if 
that  which  is  physical  could  be  at  the  same  time  that  which 
is  defined  to  be  not  physical — that  is,  beyond  physics ;  that 
which  appeals  to  outer  sense  be  at  the  same  time  that  which 
does  not  appeal  to  outer  sense.  As  I  have  already  pointed 
out,  self-consciousness  acts  alone,  without  help  from  asso- 
ciation, either  with  the  external  senses  or  with  any  supple- 
mentary internal  modes  of  observation;  and  it  cannot 
therefore  ever  identify  a  common  cause  of  its  affections  and 
of  the  affections  of  an  external  sense.  But  is  it  thereupon 
absolutely  necessary  to  conclude  that  these  belong  to 
existences  of  an  entirely  opposite  nature :  the  one  to  a 
spiritual  and  the  other  to  a  material  order  of  being  ? 

Light  and  sound,  regarded  purely  as  conscious  states, 
are  as  unlike  as  can  be ;  there  is  no  relation  conceivable 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  101 

between  tliem  in  that  internal  aspect ;  nevertlieless,  they  are 
not  really  so  unrelated  and  so  radically  asunder  as  they  seem, 
since,  by  going  deeper  into  an  examination  of  their  respective 
natures  than  unaided  sense  could  do,  we  have  reached  a 
higher  plane  of  knowledge,  and  from  that  we  perceive  them 
both  to  be  caused  by  undulations  in  elastic  media  and  to 
have  remarkable  analogies.  Is  it  not  the  fact  indeed  that 
jthe  undulatory  theory  of  light  was  first  suggested  by  the 
undulations  of  sound  ?  In  like  manner,  the  gulf  between 
tlie  conception  of  the  movements  of  cerebral  molecules  and 
the  self-consciousness  of  will-energy  may  well  be  due  to  the 
different  ways  of  acquiring  them ;  molecular  motion  and  will 
be  one  and  the  same  event  seen  under  different  aspects,  and 
to  be  known  as  such  one  day  from  a  higher  plane  of  know- 
ledge. Perhaps  when  that  time  comes  the  theory  of  an  all- 
pervading  mentiferous  ether  may  help  to  bridge  over  the 
difficulty.  For  if  the  object  and  the  brain  are  alike  pervaded 
by  such  a  hyper-subtile  ether  ;  and  if  the  impression  which 
the  particular  object  makes  upon  mind  be  then  a  sort  of 
pattern  of  the  mentiferous  undulations  as  they  are  stirred 
and  conditioned  within  it  by  its  particular  form  and  proper- 
ties ;  and  if  the  mind  in  turn  be  the  mentiferous  undulations 
as  conditioned  by  the  convoluted  form  and  the  exceedingly 
complicated  and  delicate  structure  of  the  brain  ; — then  it  is 
plain  we  have  eluded  the  impassable  difficulty  of  conceiving 
the  action  of  mind  upon  matter — the  material  upon  the 
immaterial — which  results  from  the  notion  of  their  entirely 
different  natures. 

Here  in  fact  is  a  theory  that  gets  rid  at  the  same  time 
of  the  gross  materiality  of  matter  and  of  the  intangible 
^irituality  of  mind,  and  instead  of  binding  them  together 
in  an  abhorred  and  unnatural  union  of  qpposites,  unites 
them  in  a  happy  and  congenial  marriage  in  an  intermediate 
region,  and,  if  I  may  so  speak,  isn  an  intermediate  substance ; 
a  substance  which,  mediator-like,  partakes  the  nature  of 
Both  without  being  exclusively  either.  If  perchance  you 
object  that  the  theory  really  only  evades  the  difficulty  by 
putting  mind,  in  the  shape  of  a  mentiferous  ether,  into 
nature  and  virtually  getting  rid  of  matter,  this  answer  shall 


102  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

suffice — that  tlie  special  fonn  and  structure  of  the  brain  are 
necessary  to  determine  such  undulations  of  its  pervading 
ether  as  are  truly  mental ;  and  that  the  undulations  of 
mentiferous  ether  in  inorganic  and  most  organic  objects 
cannot  therefore  have  anything  more  of  the  character  of 
conscious  mind  than  their  material  particles  have.  But  of 
what  use  is  the  theory  in  the  end,  since  in  no  case  does  it 
help  us  in  the  least  to  an  expla.nation  of  consciousness,  it 
will  be  said  ?  There,  indeed,  like  most  speculative  theories 
of  a  grandly  ambitious  character,  it  will  require  consider- 
able buttressing ;  it  must,  in  fact,  in  order  to  account  for 
consciousness,  assume  that  which  it  is  required  to  explain ; 
must  be  supplemented  by  the  hypothesis  (which,  being 
positively  wanted,  may  be  said,  according  to  true  theoristic 
fashion,  to  follow  of  necessity)  that  from  the  multitudinous 
collisions  of  mentiferous  undulations  in  the  brain,  and  their 
consequent  infinitely  complicated  refractions  and  reflections 
there — a  sort  of  avTjptdfMov  ysXaa-fjia  of  brain-waves,  such  as 
one  sees  on  the  sunlit  waves  of  ocean — eventually  is  evolved 
such  a  complex  modification  of  undulations,  or  such  a  system 
of  inconceivably  rapid  atom-quiverings,  as  expresses  itself  in 
a  certain  quasi-luminosity  or  phosphorescence — that  is  to  say, 
in  consciousness.  If  man  is  able  to  come  and  become  by 
evolution  from  molecules,  why  should  not  consciousness 
come  and  become  by  evolution  from  undulations  ? 

Leaving  for  the  present  the  high  regions  of  this  most 
pregnant  theory  which,  if  set  forth  elaborately  in  a  sufficient 
number  of  chapters,  with  all  the  proper  pomp  and  panoply  of 
swelling  words  and  thought-simulating  phi'ases,  would,  with- 
out doubt,  explain  everything  from  the  formation  of  a  mole- 
cule to  the  inheritance  by  a  boy  of  his  grandfather's  habit  of 
scratching  his  nose — all  things,  in  fact,  under  the  sun  and  in 
the  sun.  and  in  the  heavens  that  are  above  the  sun — let  me 
claim  and  fix  attention  to  this  plain  fact :  that,  although  we 
know  the  events  of  our  mental  life  by  means  of  conscious- 
ness only,  these  events  do,  nevertheless,  sometimes  proceed 
without  consciousness  on  our  parts,  and  in  that  case  must 
be  going  on  somewhere  on  the  one  side  or  the  other  of  that 
impassable   gulf,  that  bottomless  abyss,  that  lies  between 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  103 

physics  and  metaphysics.  On  which  side  ?  We  do  not  ob- 
serve them  directly,  it  is  true,  but  we  infer  them  positively 
from  observing  exactly  the  same  signs  and  the  same  effects 
of  their  operations  that  they  produce  when  they  are  opera- 
ting consciously.  In  such  case,  they  come  to  us  as  objec- 
tive knowledge ;  and  the  objective  knowledge,  as  such,  must 
cross  the  gulf  in  order  to  get  into  consciousness.  How  does 
it  manage  to  do  that?  It  does  succeed,  perhaps,  because 
the  truth,  after  all,  is  that  the  gulf  between  matter  and 
mind  is  not  a  gulf  between  two  entirely  separate  orders  of 
existence,  but  a  gulf  between  two  entirely  different  states  or 
modes  of  consciousness.  Here,  in  fact,  as  everywhere  else, 
when  we  push  the  matter  home,  we  perceive  how  much  too 
much  we  make  habitually  of  the  range  of  function  of  con- 
sciousness in  mental  operations.  Examine  closely  and  with- 
out bias  the  ordinary  mental  operations  of  daily  life,  and 
you  will  sm-ely  discover  that  consciousness  has  not  one-tenth 
part  of  the  function  therein  which  it  is  commonly  assumed 
to  have :  it  is  with  it  there  as  it  notably  is  with  it  in  ordi- 
nary vision,  where  we  only  see  directly  a  very  small  part  of 
that  which  we  think  we  see,  for  we  directly  see  a  few  familiar 
signs  only,  while  all  the  rest  is  inferential;  that  which  is 
inferred  in  the  interpretation  of  the  signs  having  been  ob- 
tained directly  by  previous  experiences  of  vision  and  of  our 
other  senses.  Consciousness  does  essential  service  in  the 
building  up  of  faculties  of  thought  and  action ;  its  part  is 
comparatively  small  in  the  use  which  we  make  of  them 
afterwards. 

As  the  higher  modes  of  consciousness  unquestionably 
rest  on  the  lower  modes,  we  may  properly,  in  trying  to  get  to 
the  nearest  approach  of  consciousness  to  molecular  motion, 
take  for  consideration  the  simplest  mode  of  sensation  that 
we  ever  experience.  Now  it  is  certain  that  a  sensation 
that  appears  to  consciousness  to  be  perfectly  simple  is 
sometimes  a  compound  of  more  simple  sensations,  none  of 
which  it  really  resembles  ;  these  more  simple  sensations  are, 
in  their  turn,  compounds  of  still  more  elementaiy  sensa- 
tions; and  the  elements  of  these,  if  not  themselves,  lie 
beneath  the  threshold  of  consciousness,  contributing  to  the 


104  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

excitation  wliicli,  wlien  it  reaches  a  certain  height  or  a  cer- 
tain complexity,  oversteps  the  threshold.  In  every  conscious 
state  there  are  thus  at  work  conscious,  sub-conscious,  and 


infra-conscious  energies,  the  last  as  indispensable  as  the  first. 
We  descend  in  our  analysis  of  consciousness  to  the  very 
borders  of  molecular  motion — to  the  place  where  the  two 
aspects  of  being  meet  and  seem  to  coalesce ;  for,  on  the  one 
hand,  where  sensation  actually  expires,  the  continuance  of  a 
connected  reflex  movement  shall  prove  the  persistence  of 
molecular  motion ;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  the  experiments 
of  physiology  prove  a  definite  measurable  period  of  mole- 
cular commotion,  known  as  the  *  excitatory  stage,'  to  precede 
invariably  the  excitation  of  the  sensation.  Moreover,  the 
same  stimulus  which  when  applied  to  the  nerve  suffices 
ordinarily  to  excite  a  sensation,  will  not  raise  the  *  excitatory 
stage '  into  consciousness,  but  will  leave  it  in  the  state  of 
latent  stimulation,  if  the  temperature  of  the  nerve  be  lowered 
a  few  degrees ;  so  that  a  few  degrees  of  temperature  make  all 
the  difference  between  soul  and  not-soul  in  a  23rocess  other- 
wise exactly  the  same.  Here  are  combinations  of  infra-con- 
scious energies  to  produce  a  sub-conscious  or  an  elementary 
conscious  state,  and  thereafter  combinations  of  elementary 
consciousnesses  to  produce  a  conscious  result  that  does  not 
resemble  any  of  them ;  not  otherwise  than  as  chemical 
elements  combine  to  form  a  compound  with  new  properties. 
What  reason  can  be  given  why  these  infra-conscious  factors 
of  the  period  of  latent  stimulation  may  not  resemble  or  be 
actually  molecular  movements  ?  And  if  they  be  so,  are  they 
so  only  up  to  the  moment  when  the  spark  of  nascent  consci- 
ousness appears,  and  do  they  then  instantly  take  on  a  new 
character  ? 

Two  things  are  sufficiently  obvious  with  respect  to 
them :  first,  that  self-consciousness  cannot  tell  us  any- 
thing whatever  about  them  (it  would  not  be  self-conscious- 
ness, but  other-self-consciousness,  if  it  could),  notwithstand- 
ing that,  as  we  have  the  best  means  of  knowing,  they  exist 
and  underlie  its  states ;  secondly,  that  the  means  of  observa- 
tion by  which  we  discover  and  examine  them  do  not  yield 
the  smallest  information  concerning  the  conscious  states  that 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  105 

accompany  or  follow  tliem.  However,  when  we  Lave  traced 
out  and  established  the  connections,  we  have  done  all  that  we 
can  be  required  rightly  or  wisely  need  attempt  to  do.  Why 
brain  functions  as  consciousness  is  just  as  barren  a  ques- 
tion as  why  a  rose  smells  sweet ;  it  is  enough  for  us  that  we 
perceive  by  experience  that  it  does.  Fragrance  of  smell  or 
fragrance  of  feeling— one  is  neither  more  nor  less  mysterious 
than  the  other.  In  order  to  accomplish  our  proper  work  of 
setting  forth  the  unfailing  order  of  the  relations  between  the 
objective  fact  and  the  subjective  feeling,  we  must  make  use 
of  the  two  methods  of  investigation — that  is,  must  look  in- 
wardly to  perceive  one  aspect  of  the  relation  and  look  out- 
wardly to  perceive  the  other  aspect  of  it.  Are  you  dissatis- 
fied with  a  science  thus  founded  on  a  double  method,  fear- 
ing a  rending  cleft  in  the  foundations  ?  There  is  no  cause  ; 
the  two  aspects,  subjective  and  objective,  will  coincide  and 
corroborate  one  another;  and  so,  perhaps,  in  the  end  psy- 
chology will  become  the  most  certain  of  sciences,  because 
founded  on  the  coincidence  of  two  independent  methods  of 
investigation — namely,  on  the  direct  and  immediate  method 
of  introspection,  and  on  the  objective  method  of  physical 
inquiry. 

Having  now  done  so  much  to  clear  the  ground  and  to 
set  the  problem  in  its  true  light,  it  is  seen  that  the  assertion 
of  the  entire  unlikeness  of  the  deliverances  of  self-conscious- 
ness to  any  operations  which  sense  informs  us  of  need  not, 
though  really  a  truism,  carry  with  it  the  stupendous  con- 
clusions as  to  two  different  orders  of  existences  which  it  is 
invariably  weighted  with.  We  will  go  on  now  to  inquire 
whether  the  operations  of  the  body  do  not  present  anything 
in  the  least  like  the  most  elementary  and  simple  functions 
of  will.  And  here,  of  course,  our  duty  is  to  take  for  consider- 
ation the  most  simple  and  irreducible  elements,  not  the 
most  complex.  The  function  of  a  single  secretion-cell, 
thoroughly  understood,  would  teach  as  much  as  the  study  of 
a  thousand  such  cells,  for  it  would  be  the  explanation  of  the 
physiology  of  secretion ;  and  it  is  in  the  complete  function 
of  the  simplest  single  cell  that  the  required  knowledge  must 
be   sought.     In  like  manner,   when   we   inquire  into  the 


106  WILL   IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

functions  of  reason  and  will,  we  shall  do  wisely  not  to  begin 
by  thinking  of  Newton  reasoning  or  of  Napoleon  willing, 
but  to  do  our  best  to  attend  at  the  humble  birth  of  reason 
and  will.  Nowise  exalted  is  the  birthplace  of  the  divine 
on  earth  :  that  lesson  the  manger  of  Bethlehem  might  have 
taught  us. 

The  first  task  is  to  take  particular  notice  of  the  different 
sorts  of  complex  movement  which  the  body  is  capable  of 
performing  by  itself,  and  to  examine  and  appreciate  their 
true  character.  The  simplest  nervous  operation,  that  which 
is  the  elemental  type  or  physiological  unit  of  which  the 
more  complex  processes  are  built  up,  as  a  great  house  is 
built  of  simple  bricks,  is  what  is  called  a  reflex  act.  An  im- 
pression is  made  upon  some  part  of  the  body ;  the  mole- 
cular change  or  the  wave  of  motion  produced  thereby  in 
the  sensory  or  afferent  nerve  is  conducted  along  it  to  a 
nerve-centre  and  unlocks  the  energy  thereof;  that  energy  is 
thereupon  transmitted  or  reflected  along  a  connected  motor 
or  efferent  nerve,  and  actuates  a  particular  movement  through 
the  proper  muscles,  a  movement  that  may  carry  a  purposive 
stamp  or  not.  For  example,  a  strong  light  is  thrown  upon 
the  retina,  and  the  pupil  contracts  instantly  in  order,  as  we 
say,  to  exclude,  because  the  effect  is  to  exclude,  the  excess 
of  light ;  a  blow  to  the  eye  is  threatened,  and  the  eyelid 
winks  involuntarily  to  protect  it ;  a  lump  of  food  is  pushed 
to  the  back  of  the  mouth,  and  so  soon  as  it  gets  there  the 
muscles  contract,  grasp  and  push  it  on ;  the  tip  of  the  finger 
is  put  between  the  lips  of  the  malformed  infant  just  born 
without  a  brain,  and  it  immediately  makes  sucking  move- 
ments. In  these  and  multiform  other  movements  of  a  like 
kind,  though  each  fulfils  a  definite  end,  the  will  has  no  part 
whatever ;  they  take  place  not  only  without  its  concurrence, 
but  in  spite  of  its  resistance  sometimes,  as  everybody  knows, 
and  one  of  them — the  contraction  of  the  pupil — even  when 
a  person  is  completely  unconscious  in  sleep  or  in  apoplexy. 

Most  striking  perhaps  in  this  connection  is  the  instructive 
Instance  furnished  by  a  well-known  experiment  on  the  frog : 
if  its  thigh  be  touched  with  a  drop  of  irritating  acid  it  rubs 
It  off  with  the  foot  of  that  side ;  and  when  it  is  prevented 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  107 

from  using  that  foot  for  the  purpose,  it  makes  use  of  the 
opposite  leg.  Plain  evidence,  it  might  seem,  of  intelligent 
design  and  will  on  its  part,  for  when  it  is  frustrated  in  one 
adaptive  effort  it  has  immediate  recourse  to  another.  But 
exclude  intelligent  design  and  will  by  cutting  off  the  frog's 
head,  and  the  result  of  the  experiment,  if  made  with  the 
proper  care,  is  the  same  :  it  tries  first  to  use  its  right  foot 
to  wipe  off  the  acid,  and  when  it  is  hindered  from  helping 
itself  in  that  way  it  bends  the  other  leg  across  for  the 
purpose,  exactly  as  it  did  when  it  had  its  head.  Of  the 
two  fundamental  types  of  animal  movements — that  is  to  say, 
movements  of  aggression,  in  order  to  ensue  pleasure  and 
increase  life ;  and  movements  of  defence,  in  order  to  eschew 
pain  and  ward  off  what  is  hurtful  to  life — Goltz  has  obtained 
examples  of  each  in  the  decapitated  frog.  For  besides  the 
above-mentioned  remarkable  movement  of  defence,  he  has 
elicited  the  quack  or  croak  which  is  the  expression  of  joy,  by 
stroking  the  creature  gently  on  its  back,  as  well  as  the 
movement  of  the  male  to  embrace  the  female  in  sexual 
congress,  by  gentle  pressure  and  rubbing,  at  the  proper 
season,  of  its  breast  and  the  inside  of  its  arms. 

With  what  an  admirable  purpose  then  does  the  headless 
frog  act,  howbeit  it  knows  not  what  it  does,  any  more  than 
the  pupil  does  when  it  contracts  in  a  bright  light,  or  than 
the  branch  of  a  tree  does  when,  unable  to  get  to  the  light 
in  one  direction,  it  tries  patiently  another  and  more  cir- 
cuitous way.  Behold  plain  proof  of  sensibility,  intelli- 
gence and  will,  may  well  be  the  exclamation  of  those  who 
are  not  sufficiently  mindful  that  the  true  mode  of  viewing 
the  phenomena  is  not  to  read  into  them  from  a  higher 
experience  what  is  not  there,  but  to  read  out  of  them, 
without  bias,  simply  what  is  there.  The  truly  warranted 
conclusion  is  that  the  nervous  system  has  the  power, 
instinct  in  its  constitution  or  acquired  by  training,  to  exe- 
cute mechanically  acts  that  have  all  the  semblance  of 
being  designed  and  voluntary,  without  there  being  the  least 
consciousness  or  will  in  them ;  not  otherwise  perhaps  than 
as  the  ant  performs  all  the  duties  of  a  good  citizen  in  a 
complex  society,  without  having  an  elaborate  theory  of  the 


108  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

constitution  of  tlie  society  in  its  tiny  brain.  If  people 
choose  to  call  voluntary  the  acts  that  are  not  conscious,  they 
do  not  thereby  alter  the  facts,  which  remain  quite  different 
in  spite  of  the  common  naming ;  what  they  do  is  simply  to 
destroy  the  definite  meanings  of  the  terms  that  they  mis- 
apply. We  cannot  have  will  where  we  have  not  conscious- 
ness, but  it  may  well  be  that  we  have  in  these  adaptive 
bodily  acts  the  basis  of  that  which,  when  it  takes  place  in 
a  higher  nerve-centre,  we  are  conscious  of  as  will — an 
energy  capable  of  executing  purposive  movements,  and  free, 
so  to  speak,  to  choose  the  right  one,  but  not  free  to  choose 
the  wrong  one.  A  perfect  consummation  and  bliss :  to  be 
freed  from  the  liberty  to  go  wrong,  as  Malebranche  prayed 
to  be,  and  to  possess  the  freedom  of  necessarily  doing  right, 
which  he  prayed  to  have  ! 

As  soon  as  the  young  chicken  is  out  of  the  egg  it  pecks 
at  a  grain  of  corn  with  quick  and  exact  aim  ;  that  is  to  say, 
without  the  least  education  or  previous  practice  it  is  able  to 
put  various  muscles  into  action,  concurrent  and  sequent, 
with  the  nicest  adaptation  of  the  requisite  degree  of  con- 
traction of  each  muscle,  to  perform  a  very  complex  act. 
Given  the  mechanism  ready  to  hand,  all  the  skill  of  the 
most  accomplished  workman  could  not  put  it  into  such  nice 
and  adapted  action  to  do  the  exact  work.  Many  months 
must  pass  and  much  tedious  training  must  be  gone  through 
before  an  infant  can  learn  to  pick  up  a  grain  at  all,  and  no 
amount  of  training  will  enable  it  to  do  so  with  the  ease, 
nicety  and  rapidity  which  the  chick  shows  without  any 
training ;  indeed,  the  chicken's  incapacity  would  be  to 
imitate  the  bungling  attempts  of  the  child.  There  must  be 
on  the  child's  part  much  patient  adaptation  and  many 
repetitions  of  effort  in  order  to  accomplish  the  involution, 
so  to  say,  of  an  acquired  energy  that  shall  afterwards  be 
evolved  and  discharged  in  function.  When  the  infant 
has  at  last  learnt  tediously  to  do  badly  that  which  the 
chicken  does  well  at  once  we  say  that  it  acts  from  volition, 
while  the  chicken  is  said  to  act  from  instinct ;  in  saying 
which  it  is  not  meant  to  imply — at  any  rate,  by  those  who 
do  not  aUow  a  word  to  do  service  for  an  idea — that  instinct 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  109 

is  some  wonderful  entity  in  it,  but  simply  that  tlie  power  or 
faculty  of  doing  the  thing  is  instinct  or  innate  in  the  con- 
stitution of  its  nervous  system.  It  is  but  another  way  of 
saying  that  the  body  has  the  power,  in  virtue  simply  of  its 
physiological  mechanism,  without  any  help  of  will,  to  execute 
most  complex  purposive  acts  in  the  most  perfect  manner. 
Whether  a  power  of  the  kind  is  inborn,  as  is  the  case  com- 
monly in  animals  and  in  not  a  few  instances  in  man,  or  is 
acquired  by  training  and  practice,  as  is  the  case  in  a  few 
instances  in  animals  and  commonly  in  man,  does  not  matter 
as  regards  its  essentially  physical  nature :  in  either  case  we 
are  entitled  to  see  in  it  a  pretty  fair  physical  basis  of  a 
rudimentary  will. 

Another  step  forward.  As  everybody  knows,  the  will 
has  not  the  power  to  execute  only,  but  it  has  the  power  to 
prevent  execution,  to  hold  impulses  in  check ;  indeed,  its 
energies  are  most  tasked  and  its  highest  qualities  shown  in 
the  exercise  of  this  controlling  function.  Our  appetites  and 
passions  prompt  or  urge  their  immediate  gratification  ;  it  is 
the  nobler  function  of  will,  enlightened  by  reason  looking 
before  and  after,  to  curb  these  lower  impulses  of  our  nature. 
An  emotion  springing  from  offended  self-love  calls  into 
action  its  congenial  ideas  of  revenge,  and  instigates  conduct 
in  the  line  of  their  resultant  energies ;  it  is  the  higher 
function  of  a  rightly  inspired  will,  having  regard  to  the 
ultimate  good  of  the  whole  being  instead  of  the  present 
gratification  of  a  particular  function  or  passion  of  it,  to 
withstand  these  forces  by  summoning  into  action  thoughts 
of  a  higher  and  wider  range,  whether  prudential,  moral,  or 
philosophical.  The  question  is,  then,  whether  there  is  any- 
thing in  the  operations  of  the  nervous  system  which  can 
conceivably  be  the  basis  of  this  exalted  governing  function 
— this  capacity,  when  impulse  urges,  to  act  from  duty. 

When  we  pass  in  review  the  various  reflex  movements  of 
the  body  we  perceive  that  there  are  some — and  those  essen- 
tial to  the  continuance  of  life — over  which  the  will  has  no 
authority  whatever  :  the  movements  of  the  heart  and  of  the 
intestines,  for  example,  which  go  on  regularly  night  and  day, 
asleep  and  awake,  it  can  neither  slacken  nor  quicken  nor 


110  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

stop  by  any  exertion  that  it  can  make.  Neither  there  nor 
in  the  silent  depths  of  the  organic  life  of  the  tissues  are  its 
commands  heard.  Other  reflex  movements,  those  of 
breathing,  for  instance,  it  can  control  partially;  we  can 
breathe  quickly  or  slowly  as  we  please,  or  even  stop  breathing 
for  a  time,  though  not  for  long,  since  no  one  can  kill  himself 
by  simply  holding  his  breath.  The  will  has  in  that  business 
a  strictly  limited  authority— the  authority  to  intervene  and 
modify,  but  not  the  authority  to  govern  absolutely.  In 
order  to  form  a  conception  of  its  probable  mode  of  operation 
when  it  thus  intervenes  with  effect,  it  is  desirable  to  appre- 
ciate the  nature  of  pure  physiological  inhibition  as  we 
observe  it  work  to  check  or  stop  action  that  is  entirely  reflex. 

Take,  for  instance,  the  beating  of  the  heart :  the  experi- 
menter can  easily  quicken  or  slacken  the  pulsation  of  an 
animal's  heart  by  manipulating  the  proper  nerves;  for  by  stimu- 
lating the  vagus  nerve  he  retards  them,  and  by  stimulating 
the  sympathetic  nerve  he  quickens  them  ;  thus  he  demon* 
strates  that  the  function  of  one  nerve  can  be  exerted  directly 
to  inhibit  the  function  of  another  nerve.  But  besides  this 
direct  effect  he  can  produce  the  inhibition  in  an  indirect 
way  :  for  example,  when  he  suspends  a  frog  by  its  legs  and 
then  taps  sharply  on  its  belly,  or  when  he  exposes  its  in- 
testines for  a  short  time  to  the  air  so  as  to  render  them  very 
sensitive,  and  then  simply  touches  them — breathing  the 
while  perhaps,  if  he  bethink  himself,  a  passing  prayer  that 
the  gain  to  him  will  one  day  be  proved  to  be  worth  the  pain 
to  it — he  instantly  stops  its  heart  for  a  time.  What  pre- 
sumably happens  is  that  the  stimulus  of  the  tap  or  touch  is 
carried  by  the  affected  nerve  to  a  nerve-centre  in  the  brain 
near  that  centre  from  which  a  nerve  to  the  heart  proceeds, 
and  so  acts  upon  it  in  the  result  as  to  inhibit  its  pulsations. 
In  fact,  the  experiment  teaches  that  the  physiological  sym- 
pathy of  nerve-centres  in  their  intimate  confederation  in 
the  nervous  system  is  such  that  one  centre,  when  stimulated 
to  action,  has  the  power  to  inhibit  physically  the  function  of 
another  centre ;  not  much  otherwise  apparently  than  as  an 
act  of  will  inhibits  the  movements  of  breathing. 

This  comparison  of  the  temporary  arrest  of  the  heart's 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  Ill 

beat  by  an  intercurrent  stimulus  into  its  reflex  arc  witb  the 
temporary  arrest  of  respiration  by  an  intercurrent  stimulus 
into  its  reflex  arc,  will,  without  doubt,  be  repudiated  by  those 
who  cannot  conceive  the  action  of  will,  even  when  it  wears 
its  most  physical  aspect,  to  have  the  least  affinity  to,  or 
suffer  the  least  comparison  with,  the  action  of  a  physiological 
stimulus.  Between  them  they  see  a  great  gulf  fixed.  How- 
ever, if  we  look  calmly  and  frankly  at  the  facts,  with  a 
sincere  desire  to  see  them  as  they  are,  we  perceive  the  gulf, 
though  impassable  directly,  to  be  less  formidable  than  it 
appears  at  first  sight ;  for  we  discover  functions  that,  occu- 
pying an  intermediate  position  between  a  physiological 
stimulus  and  will,  certainly  lessen  much  the  gap  between  it 
and  reflex  function. 

Take,  as  first  mstance,  the  molecular  commotion  of  a 
_cerebral  centre  which  in  its  subjective  aspect  we  call  an 
emotion  :  its  explosion  or  discharge  of  energy  notably  affects 
violently  the  movements  of  the  heart  and  of  respiration,  in 
a  way  the  will  cannot  do.  Does  it  in  that  case  act  by  the 
unsearchable  path  of  a  metaphysical  volition,  or  by  the 
known  physical  paths  of  physiological  inhibition  ?  Does 
the  molecular  commotion  go  by  one  path  and  the  parallel 
emotion  by  another?  If  it  be  supposed  that  the  rage  of 
an  Australian  savage  whose  fish  has  been  stolen  from  him, 
or  of  a  speechless  idiot  that  goes  into  uncouth  convulsions 
of  fury  because  another  idiot  has  a  piece  of  sugar  given  to 
it,  is  of  too  exalted  a  nature  to  be  mentioned  in  the  same 
breath  with  a  purely  physiological  energy,  it  will  be  proper 
to  go  a  step  lower  and  to  take  for  illustration  a  sensation. 
A  sharp  pain  affects  suddenly  the  movements  of  the  heart 
and  of  respiration,  independently  of  the  will,  which  may 
be  not  only  not  consentient  but  actively  dissentient ;  and 
it  is  probable  that  the  prick  of  a  pin  at  the  right  moment 
would  inhibit  the  most  intense  and  eager  complex  reflex 
movements  that  a  human  being  is  capable  of,  though  a  snail 
or  frog  notoriously  shows  itself  insensible  to  pricking  or 
cutting  when  engaged  in  the  physiological  act  entailing 
similar  movements.  Here  we  may  fairly  ask  again  whether 
we  have  not  to  do  with  reflex  inhibition  by  physical  paths 


112  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

and  by  physical  agencies ;  nor  can  we  doubt  what  tlie  reply 
ought  to  be,  since  there  are  physiological  experiments  to 
show  that  a  stimulus  that  would  cause  pain  to  an  animal, 
were  it  conscious  of  it,  will  still  produce  its  particular  effect 
upon  movement  when  the  removal  of  the  creature's  brain  or 
the  severance  of  its  spinal  cord  has  abolished  sensation  of 
the  parts  of  the  body  concerned.  The  physical  event  then 
takes  place,  though  no  consciousness  goes  along  with  it. 

Without  multiplying,  as  might  easily  be  (Tbne,  striking 
instances  of  inhibitive  function,  by  selecting  them  from  the 
operations  of  the  body  both  in  health  and  in  disease,  it  will 
be  well  to  set  down  and  emphasise  the  broad  conclusions 
that  are  thus  far  warranted.  They  are  these:  first,  that 
the  nervous  system  has  the  power  to  execute  through  the 
proper  muscular  mechanism  purposive  acts,  without  any 
intervention  of  consciousness  or  will,  and,  secondly,  that  one 
nervous  centre,  when  stimulated  to  activity,  may  so  act  upon 
another  of  the  confederated  centres  as  either  to  help,  or  to 
hinder,  or  to  suspend  its  function  by  purely  physiological 
mechanism — may,  if  it  reach  a  certain  pitch  of  ecstatic 
activity,  so  far  inhibit  other  centres  as  to  paralyse  their 
functions  for  a  time ;  as  we  see  in  the  examples  of  the  pro- 
creating frog,  of  the  religious  ecstatic,  of  the  soldier  who 
feels  not  at  the  time  the  wound  received  in  the  transport  of 
battle,  and  in  ma.ny  like  instances.  Behold  then  two  purely 
bodily  functions  that  run  closely  parallel  to  the  rudiments  of 
volition,  and  may  well  be  their  physiological  equivalents — to 
wit,  power  to  command  execution  of  a  purpose  and  power  to 
stay  execution. 

Having  got  these  firm  physiological  bases,  let  us  now 
proceed  to  examine  the  simplest  instances  of  volition,  as  we 
meet  with  them  in  the  animal  and  in  the  infant.  For  the 
riofht  method  is  to  start  from  the  observation  of  its  small  and 
simple  beginnings,  and  not  to  confuse  and  perplex  oneself 
by  peering  introspectively  into  its  highest  displays  in  a  much 
cultivated  self-consciousness,  where  the  difficulties  of  a  suc- 
cessful analysis  are  insuperable.  To  build  up  a  theory  of 
will  by  leaving  out  of  account  the  facts  of  its  genesis  and 
development,  and  the  manifold  varieties  of  particular  wills  in 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS,  113 

individual  cases,  is  to  construct  an  artificial  philosophy  that 
may  serve  well  for  intellectual  gymnastics  in  scholastic 
exercises,  but  w^hich  has  no  bearing  upon  the  concerns  and 
doings  of  real  life — upon  the  daily  incomings  and  outgoings 
of  men.  That  will  is  a  power  of  better  quality  and  higher 
dignity  in  man  than  in  animal  or  infant  admits  of  no 
question ;  but  that  is  an  excellent  reason  why  we  ought  to 
study  the  successive  stages  of  its  evolution  from  the  lower  to 
the  higher  level  of  being.  When  a  young  dog,  in  obedience 
to  its  natural  impulse,  seizes  a  piece  of  meat  that  lies  near 
it  and  is  whipped  for  the  theft,  or  starts  off  in  eager  pursuit 
of  a  hare  that  jumps  up  in  front  of  it  and  is  sharply 
punished  for  its  conduct,  the  memory  of  what  it  was  made 
to  suffer  for  yielding  to  instant  desire  intervenes  on  the  next 
similar  occasion  between  the  impression  on  sight  and  the 
ensuing  impulse,  and  checks  or  inhibits  it.  In  like  manner, 
when  an  infant,  obeying  its  natural  impulse  to  apprehend 
objects  by  grasping  them,  seizes  hold  of  some  bright  object 
that  attracts  its  gaze,  and  is  burnt  for  its  pains,  it  remembers 
its  painful  experience ;  and  the  memory  of  the  pain  that  it 
suffered  intervenes  to  check  or  inhibit  a  like  hasty  movement 
on  another  occasion.  Here,  then,  are  two  simple  instances 
that  are  just  as  instructive  as  a  thousand  similar  instances 
would  be  :  the  animal  and  infant  has  each  voluntarily  re- 
strained itself  from  doing  what  its  first  impulse  was  to  do  ; 
of  two  courses  it  has  chosen  the  best — the  path  of  enlightened 
prudence  or  duty  in  preference  to  the  path  of  natural  pro- 
clivity. You  may  complicate  the  business  as  much  as  you 
please  by  multiplying  the  experiences  and  reflections,  till 
the  outcoming  will  is  the  resultant  of  manifold,  intricate, 
delicate,  and  circuitous  interactions,  but  that  alters  not  the 
fundamental  character  of  the  process;  in  the  simple  instances 
adduced  we  have  the  typical  scheme  of  volition,  the  elemental 
units  of  the  most  complex  willing. 

Let  us  now  proceed  to  consider  the  physical  side  of  the 
process.  What  has  happened  there?  In  the  first  case, 
where  the  dog  on  seeing  the  meat  seized  it  instantly,  a 
particular  impression  on  the  sense  of  sight,  the  conduction 
of  the  molecular  motion  caused  thereby  to  a  special  nerve- 


114  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

centre,  and  the  consequent  excitation  of  a  special  perception, 
as  the  ingoing  process ;  then,  as  the  outgoing  process,  the 
transmission  of  liberated  energy  along  motor  nerve  to  muscle, 
and  a  consequent  adaptive  act :  what  we  call  a  reflex  process 
in  the  mental  plane.  In  the  second  event,  when  the  punish- 
ment was  instantly  inflicted  upon  the  dog  for  yielding  to  its 
natural  proclivity,  there  was  the  painful  stimulation  of 
another  nerve-centre  by  the  blows,  with  the  appropriate 
motor  outcome  in  writhings  and  howls,  whence  followed  the 
association  of  the  pain  with  the  immediately  preceding  event. 
This  close  functional  association  of  nerve-centres  correspond- 
ing to  the  close  contiguity  of  the  events  being  effected — a 
subjective  necessity  reflecting  the  objective  sequence — thence- 
forth the  excitation  of  the  first  reflex  process  entails  the 
excitation  of  the  second.  Accordingly,  in  the  third  case, 
where  the  dog  withstood  the  impulse  to  snatch  the  meat, 
there  was  along  with  the  special  perception  the  immediate 
stimulation  of  the  associated  nerve-centre  that  had  suffered 
and  registered  the  memory  of  the  suffering;  and  the  conse- 
quence was  the  resistance  to  or  inhibition  of  the  instant 
impulse  and  the  prevention  of  the  movement.  In  other 
words,  one  of  two  catenated  nerve-centres  has  been  excited 
to  inhibit  the  other. 

It  is  not  difficult  to  conceive  the  multiplication  of  this 
simple  scheme  of  associated  centres — these  physiological  units 
of  composition — and  a  corresponding  increase  in  the  number 
and  intricacy  of  their  connections ;  for  it  is  easy  to  conceive 
such  a  dynamically  associated  group  of  centres  to  become,  in 
turn,  the  unit  of  further  more  complex  groupings,  and  so  on 
in  multiplying  complications ;  and  if  we  do  that,  we  shall 
have  a  pretty  fair  general  conception  of  the  constitution  of 
the  brain,  which  contains  actually  a  countless  multitude 
of  inter-connected  nerve-centres,  of  high  and  low  dignity, 
arranged  in  the  same  layer  and  in  superimposed  layers, 
functionally  differentiated,  and  ready  to  be  stirred  into  action 
by  suitable  stimulation  to  increase,  to  combine,  to  restrain, 
to  neutralise,  to  modify  in  unknown  ways  one  another's 
function.  We  might  perhaps  assist  conception  by  thinking 
of  it  as  a  sort  of  '  Bradshaw's  Eailway  Guide,'  the  many  thin 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  115 

and  closely  printed  leaves  of  which,  covered  with  a  multitude 
of  seemingly  unintelligible  figures  and  hieroglyphics,  might 
well  appear  to  be  without  significance,  or  to  have  significance 
lost  in  an  overwhelming  complexity  ;  nevertheless,  when  they 
are  understood,  these  figures,  not  one  of  which  has  not  its 
proper  place  and  meaning,  tell  the  times  of  starting,  the 
stoppages,  the  junctions,  the  destination,  and  the  times  of 
arrival  of  every  train  on  every  line  in  the  country  ;  they  tell 
us,  in  fact,  almost  the  exact  place  of  every  train  on  every 
line  at  a  given  moment,  and  so  exhibit  the  clearest  order  in 
what,  could  we  compass  the  whole,  spread  out  like  a  map, 
in  a  bird's-eye  view,  would  seem  an  intricate  mass  of  confused 
movements  beginning  nowhere  and  ending  nowhere.  So  is  it 
with  the  brain  and  its  multitudinous  stations,  tracks,.] unctions 
and  branch  lines,  its  quick  trains  and  slow  trains  of  thought. 
For  as  counterpart,  on  the  mental  side,  of  the  exceeding  com- 
plexity of  physical  structure  we  have  always  more  or  less 
complex  deliberation  going  before  the  formation  of  will ; 
which  comes  out  at  last  from  the  intricate  and  circuitous 
interactions  of  so  many  hopes,  fears,  inclinations,  desires, 
promptings,  reflections — of  so  many  constituent  elements  of 
the  individual  character — that  we  are  utterly  unable  to 
analyse  them  successfully,  and  so  to  specify  accurately  the 
exact  factors  in  the  complex  composition  of  forces  which 
the  particular  will  is  the  resultant  of.  It  seems  a  perfectly 
legitimate  conclusion,  then,  that  in  the  inhibitory  action  of 
one  nerve-centre  upon  another,  as  known  by  physiological 
observation  and  experiment,  and  in  the  simplest  instances  of 
volition,  as  known  by  self-consciousness,  we  have  two  pro- 
cesses that  run  parallel — parallel  in  simplicity  when  they 
are  simple,  parallel  in  ascending  complexity  and  intricacy 
when  they  are  complex. 

Eeverse  the  conception  of  a  complex  nervous  system 
built  up  step  by  step  by  ascending  multiplication  and  com- 
binations of  simple  factors,  and  imagine  the  successive  re- 
movals, in  a  descending  scale,  of  the  more  complex  superim- 
posed parts :  each  more  simple  type,  as  its  level  was  reached 
in  the  process  of  denudation,  would  find  its  normal  repre- 
sentative in  the  descending  orders  or  genera  of  the  animal 


116  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

kingdom,  until  we  readied  in  the  descent  our  basal  ele- 
mental type  or  unit  of  composition,  which  we  find  realised 
in  the  lowest  creatures  that  possess  a  nervous  tissue,  and  in 
the  lowest  examples  of  nerve-function  in  the  higher  animals. 
And  assuredly  we  should  find  functions  less  and  less  complex 
running  parallel  to  the  more  and  more  simple  structure : 
complex  will  giving  place  to  less  complex,  and  this  in  turn 
to  simpler  volition  still ;  simple  volitions  replaced  by  obscure 
desires  and  instincts ;  instincts  by  simple  reflex  acts,  and 
reflex  acts  in  the  end  by  simple  irritability  of  tissue.  The 
unravelling  of  the  complicated  web  of  structure  would  be  the 
progressive  simplification  of  function  and  the  gradual  wan- 
ing of  consciousness.  It  would  be  a  plain  demonstration  of 
the  exact  parallelism  of  structure  and  function. 

Throughout   the  foregoing   exposition  there   has   been 
assumed  on  the  part  of  a  nerve-centre,  once  stimulated  to 
function,  the  capacity  to  retain  something  of  the  effects  of 
that   stimulation,   whereby   it   puts   into   after-action   that 
which  it  has  gained  by  reason  of  its  first  action.     This  capa- 
city of  retention,  which  is  the  foundation  of  the  mental 
faculties  called  acquisition,  retention,  recollection,  is  a  purely 
physiological  property,  essentially  independent  of  conscious- 
ness, and  operative  whether  memory  goes  along  with  it  or 
not ;  and  it  is  by  virtue  of  it  that,  as  previously  pointed  out, 
structure  is  moulded  along  the  lines  of  function  and  that 
the  ease  of  performance  which  we  call  habit  is  acquired. 
We  have  to  take  notice  and  to  bear  well  in  mind  that  this 
registration  takes  effect  in  the  organic  grouping  of  centres 
that  have  acted  together,  as  well  as  in  the  modification  of 
the  particular  centre ;  and  that  in  such  capacity  it  is  the 
foundation — first,  of  the  association  of  centres  and  their  cor- 
responding ideas,  and,  afterwards,  when  that  has  been  made 
very  close  and  firm,  of  the  integration  of  ideas,  so  that  simple 
ideas  unite  to  form  complex  ones  and  in  the  result  several 
come  to  act  almost  as  one.    A  statical  grouping  of  centres 
is  the  foundation  of  a  dynamical  association  of  functions; 
and  this  process  of  primary  groupings  into  secondary  more 
complex  groupings,  and  of  these  in  turn  into  still  more  com- 
plex groupings,  goes  on  through  all  the  manifold  plexuses  of 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  117 

tliouglit ;  a  complex  meclianisin  of  thouglit  being  thus 
formed  step  by  step — a  true  mental  organisation — that  may 
be  in  function  or  at  rest,  in  part  or  whole.  No  wonder  that 
we  are  unable  at  any  moment  to  recollect  more  than  an 
infinitesimal  part  of  that  which  is  stored  in  the  so-called 
chambers  of  memory,  and  are  not  even  conscious  that  it  is 
there.  We  have  collected  it  and  laid  it  by,  duly  classified — 
that  is  to  say,  arranged  and  fixed  it  in  its  proper  organic 
groupings ;  but  we  cannot  re-collect  it  and  use  it  in  cogita- 
tion unless  it  is  stirred  into  activity  through  established 
links  of  associations,  or  by  the  stroke  of  some  chance-impres- 
sion in  its  close  neighbourhood.  Note  here  an  apt  example 
how  the  derivation  of  words  helps  to  elucidate  the  origin  and 
the  growth  of  their  meanings ;  for  the  word  cogo,  to  collect, 
becomes  the  basis  of  the  words  recollect  and  cogitation,  and 
these  words  in  turn  have  been  the  foundations  of  the  meta- 
physical faculties  of  cogitation  and  recollection. 

If  we  could  imagine  human  beings  to  have  been  con- 
structed just  as  they  are,  with  the  one  exception  that  they 
were  without  consciousness,  and  to  have  been  placed  in  ex- 
actly similar  circumstances  to  those  in  which  they  have  been 
placed,  we  may  be  sure,  I  think,  that  their  doings  would 
have  exhibited  a  logical  connection ;  that  in  the  synthesis  of 
impressions  made  upon  them,  and  in  the  deductions  of  con- 
formable action,  there  would  have  been  implicit  that  which, 
when  illuminated  by  consciousness,  we  call  reason.  No  or- 
ganic being  could  live  and  thrive  without  having  some  sort 
of  synthesis,  though  an  entirely  unconscious  one,  of  the  world ; 
it  is  implicit  in  every  purposive  reflex  act,  which  is  itself  vir- 
tually an  unconscious  judgment  and  the  basis  of  conscious 
judgments.  It  is  from  this  solid  standpoint  that  the  ways 
and  doings  of  animals  and  savages  ought  to  be  studied. 
They  are  examples  of  reason  latent  or  implicit  in  adaptive 
organic  function,  and  they  do  not  necessarily  postulate  the 
bright  consciousness  with  which  we  illuminate  them  when 
reflecting  on  them.  The  reason  is  rooted  in  the  mechanism, 
not  in  the  light  by  which  consciousness  reveals  its  operations : 
the  conscious  theory  is  the  transcript,  not  the  original.  It 
is  because  of  the  erroneous  method  of  reading  into  the  minds 


118  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

of  low  savages  the  information  of  a  highly  developed  self- 
consciousness  that  the  elaborate  expositions  of  the  original 
beliefs  of  mankind,  or  of  the  primitive  data  of  their  beliefs, 
which  some  philosophers  have  undertaken,  are  so  easy,  so 
empty  often,  and  sometimes  positively  ludicrous ;  they  are 
applications  of  the  acquired  beliefs  of  evolution  to  explain 
the  genesis  of  themselves  ;  deductions  of  the  primitive  states 
of  human  thought,  feeling  and  conduct  from  the  much-im- 
portuned consciousness  of  a  philosopher,  who  imagines  how 
he  would  have  felt  and  thought  and  done  had  he  been  a 
primitive  specimen  of  the  race  instead  of  its  crown  and  con- 
summation. If  his  philosophy  has  not  been  learnt  practi- 
cally and  consolidated  by  living  and  working  among  men  in 
the  affairs  of  common  life,  but  has  been  pumped  out  of  him- 
self in  the  arm-chair  of  his  library,  he  wiU  propound  you 
thin  theories  suited  to  all  diflRculties ;  and  the  final  explan- 
ation of  all  things  by  him  shall  be  so  lucid  and  complete 
that  the  only  wonder  is  God  required  80  many  as  six  days 
in  order  to  create  the  heavens  and  the  earth  and  all  that 
therein  is. 

All  life,  including  the  highest  thought-life  of  the  brain, 
has  two  sides  that  necessarily  co-exist,  namely,  a  plastic  or 
nutritive  side,  and  a  disruptive  or  functional  side  ;  and  these 
correspond  respectively  to  composition  and  decomposition  of 
substance,  to  analysis  and  synthesis.  The  synthesis  is  again 
of  two  sorts  :  a  chemical  manufacturing  of  the  material 
whereby  it  is  made  suitable  substance ;  and  a  morphological 
distribution  of  it  in  structure,  a  building  of  it  into  definite 
and  special  forms.  In  like  manner,  the  analysis  is  of  two 
sorts  :  the  liberation  of  energy  from  chemical  decomposition 
of  substance;  and  the  definite  character  of  the  liberated 
energy,  its  unity  of  special  function,  according  to  the  par- 
ticular structural  form  which  undergoes  disruption  or  reso- 
lution, so  to  speak.  The  dualistic  doctrine  of  a  separate 
mind  is  therefore  based  upon  an  artificial  and  impossible 
separation  of  the  two  necessarily  co-existent  sides  of  thought- 
life,  namely,  the  plastic  and  the  functional.  That  is  what 
physiology  says  ;  and  it  says,  moreover,  as  a  plain  matter  of 
experience,  that  there  is  not  a  single  bodily  phenomenon 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  119 

that  has  not  its  sufficient  determining  conditions  in  an 
antecedent  state  of  th.e  body.  Where  has  free  choice  or  will 
a  place  in  these  events  ? 

Those  who  admit  that  physical  and  mental  events  go 
along  together  as  exactly  parallel  phenomena,  so  that  in 
describing  them,  were  they  both  thoroughly  known,  we 
might  very  well  be  describing  one  in  terms  of  the  other,  or 
the  same  thing  in  different  languages,  and  who  nevertheless 
bring  the  correspondences,  so  exact  and  constant  up  to  an 
unknown  point,  to  an  abrupt  end  by  the  arbitrary  interven- 
tion of  freewill,  should  endeavour  to  go  deeper  than  they  do 
into  the  inmost  and  most  intimate  physical  facts,  and  to 
imbue  their  minds  with  fitting  conceptions  of  their  necessa.ry 
order.  They  may  well  consider,  among  other  things,  that 
the  time-rate  of  a  volition  is  a  measurable  process ;  that  it 
varies  in  different  persons,  and  in  the  same  person  at  dif- 
ferent times,  according  to  varying  bodily  conditions ;  and 
that  it  may  be  experimentally  lowered  by  lowering  the 
temperature  of  the  centre  in  which  it  is  generated.  What 
room  then  for  a  metaphysical  intervention,  what  need  of  it, 
wbat  result  of  it?  From  the  physiological  standpoint  we 
may  say  confidently  that  it  is  not  wanted,  that  there  is  no 
place  for  it,  and  that,  if  it  be,  it  always  lets  the  result  go  as 
if  it  were  not.  To  assert  its  intervention  anywhere  or  at 
any  time  before  the  physical  antecedents  of  a  volition,  or 
between  them  and  the  volitional  outcome,  certainly  is  not 
psychology  but  psychogeny  ;  it  is  therefore  doctrine  which 
may  properly  be  relegated  to  the  domain  of  cosmogony. 

In  two  matters — those  too  matters  in  which  the  questions 
admit  of  being  put  with  exceptional  exactness  and  might 
claim  therefore  plain  answers — we  fail  to  get  from  the 
philosophical  upholders  of  freewill  a  frank,  definite,  and 
consistent  statement  of  their  opinions.  The  first  is  the 
exact  moment  or  point  of  evolution  in  the  animal  or  the 
human  series  where  the  undetermined  will  makes  its  first 
appearance,  since  it  is  not  generally  assumed  by  them  to  be 
co-extensive  with  volition.  Do  they  or  do  they  not  believe 
that  God,  having  created  man  in  His  own  image,  endowed 
him  with  the  ultra-pbysical  power,  so  that  all  men — serfs. 


120  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

savages,  philosopliers,  idiots  and  lunatics — always  possess  it 
and  always  have  possessed  it?  Observe  that  it  is  not  a 
question  of  the  widely  different  degrees  of  development  of 
the  same  kind  of  volition — if  it  were  that,  we  could  compre- 
hend what  was  meant — but  a  question  of  the  abrupt  ir- 
ruption somewhere,  no  one  saying  exactly  where,  of  an 
extraordinary  ultra-physical  factor.  Are  they  thereupon 
willing  to  maintain,  in  opposition  to  the  overwhelming 
evidence  of  facts,  that  animal  volition  is  of  essentially  dif- 
ferent kind  from  the  lowest  human  volition,  no  animal  pos- 
sessing jot  or  tittle  of  ultra-physical  essence?  Or  did  the 
ass  of  Eden  sin  against  freewill  by  eating  forbidden  thistles, 
and  so,  sharing  in  man's  fall,  come  to  incur  all  the  sufferings 
that  it  has  since  patiently  undergone  from  him? 

The  second  point  respecting  which  it  is  hard  to  get  a 
definite  and  consistent  answer  is  whether  the  freedom  of 
choice  that  is  supposed  to  go  before  free  action  of  will  has, 
as  every  other  mental  phenomenon  confessedly  has,  a  material 
equivalent  in  a  particular  brain-action.  If  it  has,  where 
is  the  ultra-physical  freedom;  if  not,  where  is  the  ultra- 
physical  intervention?  Apparently  one  is  required  to  be 
vaguely  content  to  allow  the  antecedents  and  outcome  of  a 
volition  to  take  place  practically  as  physical  events,  and  to 
admit  that  they  take  place  in  exact  and  even  compulsory 
correspondence  with  a  series  of  motives  and  a  resultant  will, 
so  long  as  it  is  acknowledged  theoretically  that  the  ultra- 
physical  factor  exists  in  the  background,  and  is  capable  of 
intervening  in  the  rarely  or  never  occurring  event  of  its 
being  called  upon  to  do  so.  An  actual  intervention  is  not 
insisted  upon  in  any  particular  case,  if  only  it  be  granted 
generally  that  it  may  take  place  if  it  wills  or  pleases :  the 
chain  of  events  is  practically  compulsory,  but  theoretically 
it  may  be  broken  and  pieced  again  at  any  link.  To  refuse 
compliance  with  so  modest  a  request  may  appear  ungracious, 
when  compliance  seems  to  cost  so  little ;  but  none  the  less 
would  the  acknowledgment  be  an  implicit  avowal  that 
causation  does  not  reign  in  human  events,  and  that  a  science 
of  human  mind  must  always  be  metaphysical  nescience. 

It   is   remarkable  how  little  the  advocates  of  a  meta- 


lis  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  121 

physical   soul,  though,  never   so   exacting  in  their   critical 
demands  upon  materialistic  theories,  ever  think  of  the  many 
difficulties  of  their  ovs'n  theory,  and  how  quietly  they  pass 
them  by  as  parts  of  the  big  mystery  which  they  feel  no 
obligation  to  explain  or  even  to  consider.     If  a  soul  is  to  be . 
postulated,  surely  one  is  entitled  to  be  told  something  about 
it.    Of  what  substance  is  it  made,  because  substance  of  some 
sort   it   must  have   if  it   is   individual?      If    of    spiritual 
substance,  what  conception  of  spirit  is  possible  other  than  a 
conception  of  something  that  is  more  subtile  than  the  most 
subtile   matter   known?     "Where   was   this   spirit  before  it 
entered   into   the   body,  and  at  what   precise   moment  of 
its  development,  when  it  was  yet  in  the  womb,  did  it  take 
possession  of  it  ?     In  what  part  of  the  body  does  it  dwell  ? 
Is  it  co-extensive  with  body,  and  yet  itself  without  extension  ? 
Will  it,  when  it  takes  leave  of  the  body,  be  able  to  feel  and 
think  and  will  in  the  same  manner  as  it  does  now  through 
the  body  ?     And  if  not,  how  will  it  keep  consciousness  of  its 
identity  and  have  continuity  of  existence  as  the  same  being  ? 
How  does  it  now  act  upon  the  body,  and  how  is  it  acted 
upon  by  it  ?    How  many  bodily  functions  are  possible  without 
it,  and  what  is  its  part  and  exact  range  in  those  functions 
that   are  not   possible  without  it?     Do   the   animals  that 
approach  nearest  to  man  possess  souls,  especially  those  that 
m  some  measure  think  with  him,  feel  vnth  him,  and  act  with 
him;  and  if  they  do,  whence  came  their  souls  before  life,  and 
where  will  they  go  after  death?    Is  the  animal  soul  material, 
and  the  human  soul  immaterial  ?    Are  we  called  upon  to  make 
three  divisions  of  substances  in  nature  corresponding  to  dif- 
ferences of  properties — the  two  last  of  them  being  sorts  of 
spiritualisations  of  matter — namely,  {a)  gross  and  palpable 
material  substance ;  (&)   animal   and   quasi-immaterial ;    (c) 
human  immaterial  ? 

That  other  persons  feel  as  I  do,  I  know  by  their  cries  and 
gestures  when  they  are  pained  or  pleased,  and  that  they 
think  as  I  do,  by  their  words  which  they  have  taught  me  to 
understand ;  in  both  cases,  that  is,  by  certain  movements 
that  are  visible  or,  so  to  speak,  audible  to  me.  I  know  the 
same  of  animals  so  far  as  gestures  and  cries  inform  me, 
9 


122  -WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

which  are,  after  all,  more  genuine  indications  of  mental 
affections  than  words ;  and  certainly  I  feel  quite  as  sure  that 
the  crouching,  fawning,  gambolling  dog  is  expressing  emo- 
tional states  as  I  am  that  a  gambolling  child  or  any  one  who 
tells  me  he  feels  them  is.  What  then  am  I  to  think  of  their 
respective  origins  ?  That  the  same  kind  of  sensation,  senti- 
ment, and  reason  proceeds  from  entirely  unrelated  sources  in 
the  two  cases — in  the  one  betokening  a  soul,  and  in  the  other 
being  the  outcome  of  matter  divinely  adapted  to  perform  such 
high  functions  ?  And  if  matter  be  in  any  case  sufficient  by 
itself  to  perform  them,  why  call  in  the  superfluous  aid  of  a 
soul  to  do  the  same  kind  of  functions  in  men  ?  If  it  be 
argued  that  the  soul  of  man  stands  high  on  a  quite  special 
platform,  because  it  has  the  subjective  certainty  of  an  intui- 
tion into  its  own  states,  still  the  objection  may  be  made  that 
the  revelations  of  my  self-consciousness  can  only  have  indi- 
vidual certainty,  and  that  the  intuitions  of  another  person's 
self-consciousness,  however  certain  to  him,  and  by  whatever 
outward  means  communicated  from  his  within,  who  is  to  me 
without,  to  my  within,  can  only  hare  the  same  sort  of  objec- 
tive value  to  rae  as  the  revelations  of  an  animal's  conscious 
states  through  its  modes  of  communication  with  me.  A 
subjective  psychology,  in  so  far  as  it  is  subjective,  cannot 
transcend  the  personal  range,  or  have  more  than  personal 
certainty. 

These  and  many  like  questions  and  objections  might 
easily  be  propounded  in  order  to  provoke  the  metaphysicians 
to  a  searching  examination  of  the  weak  points  of  their  own 
doctrine,  or  at  any  rate  in  order  to  abate  the  elation  with 
which  they  denounce  the  weaknesses  of  materialism  and 
usurp  for  spiritualism  an  impregnability  of  position  which  it 
has  not.  As  life,  however,  ofifers  much  too  much  to  do,  and 
only  a  short  time  to  do  it  in,  any  one  whose  instincts  are 
practical  will  pass  them  by  as  matters  of  idle  and  endless 
controversy.  Accepting  the  exact  parallelism  which  there  is 
the  best  reason  to  believe  to  exist  between  physiological 
processes,  made  known  by  the  senses,  and  mental  processes, 
made  known  by  self-consciousness,  he  will  make  it  his 
scientific  aim  to  trace  out  patiently  the  exact  correspondences 


ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  BASIS.  123 

between  the  two,  and  so  to  arrive  at  sucli  a  precise  and  full 
knowledge  of  both  as  to  be  able  to  saj  with  certitude  :  This 
physiological  state  of  things  being  manifest  to  observation, 
of  necessity  this  psychological  experience  will  be  sensible  to 
consciousness ;  and  to  say  that  of  every  mental  function  of 
the  brain  and  of  every  affection  of  consciousness.  Those 
■who  are  alive  when  that  day  comes,  may  then  rightly  say, 
after  the  manner  of  Spinoza,  that  the  brain  is  visible  mind 
and  the  mind  invisible  brain.  Meanwhile,  as  we  of  this  day 
and  generation  are  not  likely  to  reach  that  fulness  and 
exactness  of  knowledge,  it  will  be  wise  not  to  describe  the 
objective  aspect  of  mental  events  in  terms  of  the  subjective, 
nor  the  subjective  in  terms  of  the  objective  indifferently,  but 
to  keep  their  respective  languages  apart;  aiming  only  to 
bring  about  as  close  and  exact  a  correspondence  between  the 
descriptive  languages  as  we  discover  between  the  external 
facts  of  observation  and  the  internal  facts  of  consciousness. 
This  we  may  do  without  being  such  exacting  pedants  as  to 
be  offended  with  expressions  like  the  wail  of  the  winds,  the 
murmur  of  the  water,  the  sighing  of  the  breeze,  the  joy  and 
the  melancholy  of  nature :  expressions  which,  after  aD, 
bespeak  a  truth  of  unity  that  is  deeper  than  knowledge. 


SECTION  II. 

CONCEENING   THE   NOTION    OP   NECESSITY. 

Before  I  proceed  to  further  considerations  of  a  physiolo- 
gical kind  respecting  will,  I  pause  by  the  way  at  this  fitting 
halting  place  in  order  to  make  a  reflection  about  necessity. 
As  most  people  discuss  the  so-called  freedom  of  will  as  an 
abstraction,  without  being  in  good  earnest  to  test  their  con- 
clusions by  a  rigid  application  to  the  concrete  case,  and  so 
to  get  an  exact  apprehension  of  what  they  really  mean, 
satisfied  to  rest  in  the  vague,  and  invariably  falling  back 


124  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

upon  the  bare  dogma  whenever  they  are  confronted  with 
practical  difficulties  ;  so  likewise  do  they  transform  necessity 
into  a  sort  of  abstract  despotic  entity,  and  look  upon  it  as  a 
sternly  binding  tie,  an  inexorable  fate,  in  all  operations  of 
nature  from  which  freewill  is  excluded.  It  seems  to  be  an 
invincible  tendency  of  the  human  mind  thus  to  make  enti- 
ties out  of  abstractions  ;  for  materialists  display  it,  equally 
with  metaphysicians,  since  they  talk  of  matter  (which 
is  purely  an  abstraction)  and  discuss  its  operations,  as  if  it 
were  a  real  thing  and  had  existence  apart  from  its  manifold 
varieties.  If  a  man's  will  be  not  free,  we  are  supposed  to 
conclude  that  he  is  under  the  dominion  of  this  irresistible 
compulsion,  this  fateful  necessity,  and  not  a  responsible 
agent;  that  he  is  not  a  proper  subject  either  of  praise  or 
blame,  since  he  could  not  will  but  as  he  must,  and  could  not 
have  done  otherwise  than  as  he  did,  whatever  he  did.  Cer- 
tainly he  could  not  have  done  otherwise  than  as  he  did  on 
that  occasion,  but  he  is  not  therefore  f  atebound  to  do  the 
same  on  another  occasion. 

Necessity  has  not  objective  existence  any  more  than  a 
smell  has  objective  existence ;  it  is  merely  the  general  ex- 
pression or  statement  of  all  human  experience  that  definite 
antecedents  are  invariably  followed  by  definite  consequences  : 
a  declaration  of  invariable  uniformity,  the  opposite  concep- 
tion to  which  is  not  freedom  but  contingency.  It  is  a  law 
of  nature,  and  therefore  a  necessity,  that  the  sun  rises  day 
after  day ;  but  time  was  when  the  sun  did  not  rise  on  human 
doings,  nor  at  all,  and  there  will  be  a  time  happily  when  it 
wiU  not  rise  on  them  any  more,  nor  rise  at  all.  General 
laws  are  not  outward  realities,  but  our  notional  relations  to 
outward  realities.  Change  the  antecedents  of  a  choice  of 
will,  as  a  person  does  when  he  profits  by  experience,  and 
where  is  the  necessity?  He  is  now  under  the  necessity 
that  his  past  acts  have  made  for  him  to  follow  the  changed 
antecedents.  The  man  who  walks  to  the  cliff  one  day  in 
order  to  commit  suicide  and  does  not  do  it,  and  walks  to 
the  cliff  another  day  and  does  do  it — other  things  being  the 
same — would  not  have  done  it  the  second  time  had  it  been 
the  first,  and  would  have  done  it  the  first  time  had  it  been 


CONCEENING  THE  NOTION  OF  NECESSITY.  125 

the  second.  The  dog  which,  obeying  its  instinct,  starts 
in  chase  of  the  hare,  is  under  the  necessity  to  do  as  it 
does  on  the  first  occasion ;  it  is  under  the  necessity  to  do 
differently  on  the  second  occasion,  if  it  suffered  pain  for 
what  it  did  on  the  first  and  does  differently  in  consequence. 
According  to  the  existing  order  of  nature,  a  stone  dropped 
from  a  height  into  space  must  fall  to  the  ground :  it  is  under 
that  necessity.  But  it  is  not  an  absolute  and  variable  neces- 
sity ;  it  is  a  necessary  law  only  so  long  as  it  is  not  interfered 
with  by  the  operation  of  some  intervening  law ;  and  when 
we  say  that  the  stone  is  compelled  to  fall  downwards  by  the 
law  of  gravitation,  all  we  do  really  is  to  make  a  general 
statement  of  universal  experience  that  heavy  bodies  do  fall 
to  the  earth  at  a  certain  rate,  unless  they  are  prevented. 
Accordingly,  when  we  observe  that  a  piece  of  iron  does  not 
drop  to  the  ground  if  a  strong  magnet  be  suspended  just 
above  it,  but  is  drawn  upwards  to  the  magnet  and  held  fast 
by  it  in  opposition  to  the  pull  of  gravitation,  we  are  not  in 
dismay  because  a  fatal  necessity  has  been  outraged  and  de- 
posed, and  the  world  is  likely  to  fall  into  universal  anarchy  ; 
but  we  set  to  work  forthwith  to  collect  and  collate  our  expe- 
riences of  the  operations  of  the  intervening  power,  and  to  find 
out  and  formulate  the  most  general  statement  that  we  can 
concerning  them — that  is,  to  formulate  the  so-called  law  of 
its  action.  Not  so,  says  perhaps  the  necessitarian,  that  is  not 
quite  all,  there  is  something  more  than  the  mere  statement 
of  a  uniformity  of  experience ;  for  it  certainly  is  a  necessity 
that  all  bodies  tend  towards  earth  if  they  do  not  actually 
reach  it ;  they  have  no  choice,  no  alternative  in  the  matter ; 
and  if  they  are  prevented,  it  is  that  they  are  suffering  a 
restraint  of  their  natural  tendency.^  But  the  truth  is  that 
the  piece  of  iron,  magnet-attracted,  tends  the  other  way ;  it 
makes  another  choice,  doing  what  is  most  agreeable  to  its 
nature  in  the  circumstances ;  it  obeys  the  temporary  attrac- 

'  In  this  use  of  the  word  tendency  to  connote  a  sort  of  spontaneity  in  a 
body's  gravity  we  remark  a  relic  of  the  metaphysical  interpretation  of  nature 
which  imbued  it  with  sympathies  and  antipathies,  loves,  and  abhorrences,  &c. 
We  might  as  well  talk  of  the  chemical  yea/rnings  of  one  element  for  another, 
or  imitate  the  scientist  who,  lecturing  before  a  royal  personage,  said :  '  These 
gases  will  now  have  the  honour  to  combine  before  your  Royal  Highness.' 


126  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

tion  of  the  stronger  motive.  So  an  individual,  if  lie  be  free 
from  constraint,  wiUs  v^liat  he  wishes,  and  wishes  what  is 
most  agreeable  to  his  nature  in  the  then  circumstances,  and 
is  most  free  in  doing  so. 

Except  in  the  far  greater  number  and  complexity  of  the 
circumstances,  is  there  any  real  difference  between  the 
choice  that  a  man  makes  between  two  courses  of  action 
when  he  is  in  doubt  and  the  choice  that  the  piece  of  iron 
makes  between  falling  to  the  earth  and  rushing  to  the 
magnet?  It  is  possible  to  imagine  it  placed,  though  im- 
possible to  place  it,  so  nicely  between  the  attraction  of  the 
earth  and  the  counter-attraction  of  the  magnet  that  it 
shall  be  held  suspended  in  donbt,  in  an  equilibrium  of  choice, 
unable  to  resolve  which  way  to  go,  like  a  man  between  two 
evenly  balanced  motives,  or  like  the  legendary  ass  fixed 
exactly  half  way  between  the  two  exactly  similar  bundles  of 
hay.  If  it  be  true,  when  the  man  decides,  that  his  freewill 
has  put  an  end  to  the  difficulty  for  him  by  giving  the 
requisite  preponderance  to  the  attraction  of  one  of  the 
opposing  and  equal  motives ;  and  if  it  be  true  that  the  ass 
may  count  on  its  freewill  to  prevent  it  from  standing  still 
until  it  is  starved  to  death,  notwithstanding  the  exact 
equipoise  of  motives ;  why  is  it  not  true  also  that  it  is  the 
freewiU  of  the  piece  of  iron  that  determines  it  either  to  rush 
to  the  magnet  or  to  drop  to  the  ground,  since  it  is  practi- 
cally impossible  to  balance  the  counteractions  so  nicely  as 
to  keep  it  in  suspense  between  them?  And  if  the  least 
change,  a  change  so  trifling  that  we  cannot  even  fix  and 
appreciate  it,  was  enough  in  that  case  to  give  the  preponde- 
rance in  one  direction,  and  to  move  it  from  the  ideal  centre 
of  indifference,  is  it  any  wonder  that  in  a  far  more  subtile 
province  of  matter  we  cannot  always  apprehend  and  measure 
the  slight  change  that  gives  the  preponderance  to  one  or 
another  motive  in  the  complex  workings  of  human  volition  ? 

In  the  objective  necessity  which  it  has  created  the 
human  mind  has  transformed  its  subjective  experience  into 
objective  being ;  but  the  necessity  so  created  is  really,  like 
space  or  time,  only  a  condition  or  form  of  thought,  a  sub- 
jective necessity.     Feeling  necessity  in  itself,  as  it  needs 


CONCEENING  THE  NOTION   OF  NECESSITY.  127 

must,  since  it  cannot  help  thinking  two  thoughts  together 
that  have  always  occurred  together,  co-existent  or  sequent, 
it  has  made  it  a  despotic  entity  outside  itself.  Because  it  is 
bound  to  think  a  co-existence  or  sequence,  it  objectifies  the 
necessity.  So  far  as  we  can  think  of  nature  apart  from  man, 
or  of  man  apart  from  nature,  and  so  far  as  we  can  touch  a 
real-in-itself  in  either  of  the  two  ideals — liberty  and  necessity, 
we  are  well  entitled  to  say  that  there  is  far  more  necessity 
in  man  than  in  nature,  and  far  more  freedom  in  nature  than 
in  man.  Let  it  be  acknowledged,  then,  that  we  know  no 
other  necessity  in  nature  than  the  necessity  which  we  make 
in  formulating  our  experience,  and  that  it  will  last  just  as 
long  as  our  experiences  are  as  they  are,  and  no  longer. 
Could  these  experiences  become  wider  to-morrow  and  reach 
a  higher  plane  of  being,  any  so-called  law  of  nature  might 
be  contravened  and  shattered ;  and  were  our  modes  of  re- 
lation with  external  nature  changed  fundamentally — by  the 
acquisition  of  a  quite  new  sense  yielding  quite  new  expe- 
riences, or,  better  still,  by  the  opening  in  us  of  half  a 
dozen  new  senses  revealing  new  worlds  of  experience — then 
our  fundamental  laws  of  thought  would  be  changed  also, 
our  universal  categories  revolutionised ;  and  our  necessities 
of  to-day,  the  eternal  verities  we  swear  by  now,  would 
show  beside  the  eternal  verities  we  should  swear  by  then 
like  the  painful  gropings  of  a  blind  man  beside  the  quick, 
apt  and  easy  movements  of  one  who  has  his  perfect  sight. 
A  race  of  men  that  was  both  blind  and  deaf  would  go  very 
quietly  about  its  business  without  being  disturbed  in  the 
least  by  the  crash  of  thunder  or  the  flash  of  hghtning ;  but 
it  would  not  therefore  follow  that  thunder  and  lightning 
were  not  real  things  to  another  race  more  amply  furnished 
with  senses.  Are  there  no  stars  in  heaven  because  the  eye- 
less polype  cannot  see  them  ?  Is  there  no  law  of  gravitation 
because  the  brainless  oyster  does  not  apprehend  it  ?  Is  the 
world  without  moral  feeling  because  the  octopus  is  insensible 
to  it  ?  Is  there  no  music  of  the  spheres  because  '  this  muddy 
vesture  of  decay  doth  grossly  close  us  in '  that  we  cannot 
hear  it?  An  atom  in  immensity,  a  moment  in  eternity,  a 
single  pulse,  so  to  speak,  in  the  flux  of  life  upon  earth,  man 


128  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

cannot  transcend  the  narrow  limits  of  his  small  capacities ; 
can  only  reflect  in  knowledge  more  or  less  adequately  the 
minute  spot  of  space,  the  brief  moment  of  time,  in  which  he 
is ;  can  know  little  more  in  the  end  than  how  exceeding 
little  it  is  that  he  can  ever  know,  how  infinitely  much  he 
can  never  know.  '  Where  wast  thou  when  I  laid  the  founda- 
tions of  the  earth  ?  Canst  thou  bind  the  sweet  influences  of 
Pleiades,  or  loose  the  bands  of  Orion  ?  *  All  which  by  in- 
terpretation is  that  man  cannot  go  outside  the  vibrations  of 
matter  to  which  he  is  constitutionally  sensible,  and  tell  us 
anything  of  that  which  occasions  no  answering  vibrations  in 
him. 


SECTION   III. 

INVOLUTION   AND    EVOLUTION. 


In  pursuit  of  the  purpose  to  get  as  close  as  possible  to  the 
life  of  mind,  that  is  to  say,  to  its  actual  relations  as  a  vital 
phenomenon,  let  me  now  point  out  that  no  one's  mind  is  an 
individuality  in  the  sense  of  independence  and  separateness 
which  we  commonly  attach  to  the  conception  of  individuality. 
The  mind  in  truth  is  not  an  independent,  perfectly  distinct, 
self-sufficing  being,  any  more  than  the  body.  It  is  continuous 
and  dependent ;  for  it  is  a  becoming  from  the  basis  of  all  human 
past  through  the  means  of  an  essential  co-operation  of 
surroundings ;  and  it  is  for  this  reason  that  it  can  only  be 
adequately  studied  and  thoroughly  known  (a)  historically ^ 
and  (6)  in  relation  to  its  surroundings.  These  are  the 
methods  of  a  fruitful  psychology ;  for  it  is  in  those  two 
relations  that  mind  can,  properly  speaking,  be  said  to  have 
being  and  to  be  capable  of  scientific  investigation.  It  is 
plain  enough  that  the  body  cannot  live  and  be  without  food 
and  air  and  warmth  :  to  talk  of  a  living  body  as  an  indivi- 
duality apart  from  its  external  medium,  is  to  talk  of  an. 
abstract  conception,  a  notional  existence,  not  of  a  real  thing. 


INVOLUTION  AND  EVOLUTION.  129 

Every  element  of  tissue  requires  -what  Lamarck  calls  its 
ambient  medium,  and  could  not  be  a  living  element  of  tissue, 
or  even  a  lasting  element  of  non-living  tissue,  witliout  it. 
Life  is  the  exj)ression  of  tlie  fit  relations  of  the  organisation 
and  its  environing  conditions ;  the  result,  that  is  to  say,  of 
the  interactions  of  a  part  of  nature  combined  or  organised 
into  a  certain  complex  form  and  of  the  outside  nature  with 
which  it  is  in  essential  relation.  The  organism,  acting  on 
nature  to  modify  it,  and  in  turn  acted  upon  by  nature  and 
modified — made  by  circumstances  for  circumstances — is 
itself  nature  ;  one  of  an  infinite  multitude  of  temporary  in- 
carnations of  matter  that  in  a  little  while  will  fall  to 
pieces  and  go  back  to  the  main  body. 

Many  of  those  who  talk  with  easy  fluency  of  the  organism 
adapting  itself  to  its  environment,  are  apt  to  let  the  mouth- 
filling  words  fill  the  mind  too  and  so  hinder  an  exact  appli- 
cation of  thought  to  facts.  Injthe  first  place,  they  are 
dwelling  too  much  on  one  aspect  of  the  relation,  and  are 
thus  using  language  which,  so  far  as  it  has  meaning, 
means  only  a  partial  truth,  since  it  would  perhaps  be  as 
true  to  talk  of  the  environment  adapting  itself  to  the  organ- 
ism; and  in  the  second  place,  they  easily  demoralise 
themselves  by  treating  the  vague  doctrine  as  if  it  were 
itself  what  is  intended  by  it,  instead  of  making  it  real 
knowledge  by  patiently  investigating  and  disclosing  the 
processes  of  the  particular  adaptations ;  until,  growing  in  in- 
flation, they  are  content  with  such  knowledge  of  life  as  is 
implied  in  talking  of  it  as  adjustment  of  internal  relations 
to  external  relations.  No  doubt  there  is  in  the  phenomena 
of  life  the  adjustment  of  internal  to  external  relations,  as 
there  is  in  them  the  relation  of  a  somethingness  to  a  some- 
thing-elseness ;  but  it  may  be  permitted  to  doubt  whether 
either  proposition  is  a  very  valuable  addition  to  knowledge, 
and,  if  it  were  a  question  between  the  two,  whether  the  latter 
has  not  the  more  solid  and  substantial  meaning. 

As  it  is  with  the  body  so  is  it  with  mind,  which  is  the 
flower  of  its  function,  the  supreme  expression  of  its  life.  It 
also  is  the  outcome  of  the  organism  and  its  environment, 
and  could  no  more  he  without  the  ambient  medium  than  it 


130  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

could  be  without  the  organism.  Certainly  it  has  require- 
ments beyond  those  of  the  body ;  it  requires  not  only  the 
physical  medium  that  the  body  requires,  but  it  needs  also 
a  social  medium;  deprived  of  this  essential  element  of  its 
being,  it  could  no  more  live  than  the  body  could  live  deprived 
of  air.  That  is  what  we  mean  when  we  define  man  as  a 
social  being.  He  lives  only  as  a  unit  of  a  social  organisation, 
in  vital  relations  to  it,  acting  upon  it  and  acted  upon  by  it, 
inspiring  and  breathing  its  social  spirit ;  he  could  not  live 
and  move  and  have  his  human  being  separate  from  it,  any 
more  than  he  could  live  and  move  in  a  vacuum,  or  than  a 
nerve- cell  could  live  detached  from  its  plexus  in  the  brain. 
As  the  air  is  the  breath  of  his  body,  which  without  it  would 
be  dead,  so  the  social  medium  is  the  life-breath  of  his  mind, 
which  without  it  would  not  wake  to  consciousness.  No  one 
can  help  assimilating  unawares  the  moral  atmosphere  of  the 
medium  in  which  he  is ;  he  will  feel  and  be  as  he  lives ;  and 
so  it  comes  to  pass  that  persons  who,  like  thieves,  have 
renounced  all  the  obligations  of  common  morality  are  still 
imbued  with  a  sort  of  '  honour-among-thieves'-morality,  the 
obligations  of  which  they  own,  and  that  persons  of  an 
average  standard  of  general  morality  are  sometimes  no 
better  than  criminals  in  respect  of  some  special  relations  of 
"fheir  particular  sect,  trade,  or  other  social  circle  to  the  rest 
of  society.  There  is  nothing  that  is  thought  natural  which 
may  not  be  made  to  seem  unnatural,  nothing  that  is  un- 
natural which  may  not  be  made  natural,  by  long  usage  and 
custom. 

In  order  to  elucidate  further  the  essential  relations  of 
being  that  hold  between  the  living  element  and  its  medium, 
it  will  be  well  to  glance  at  the  transformations  which  matter 
has  undergone  on  earth — to  endeavour  to  apprehend  the 
meaning  of  its  successive  transpeciations.  Time  was  when 
no  life  existed  on  earth ;  it  is  now  filled  with  the  most 
complex  forms  of  life,  which  have  succeeded  to  more  simple 
and  general  forms ;  the  mutations  of  living  matter  having 
been  on  a  scale  of  increasing  complexity,  and  new  manifesta- 
tions of  energy  having  accompanied  the  successive  complica- 
tions.    Going  below  life  to  non-living  matter,  we  trace  a 


INVOLUTION  AND  EVOLUTION.  131 

similar  progressive  complication  as  we  pass  upwards  in 
knowledge  from  simple  chemical  combinations  of  elements 
to  complex  combinations,  and  from  these  again  to  more 
complex  combinations  still,  until  we  reach  that  exceeding 
complexity  of  composition  in  a  small  compass  which  exists 
in,  and  constitutes  the  basis  of,  living  matter.  Thereupon, 
making  this  simplest  living  element  the  starting  point  of  a 
new  ascent,  we  rise  from  it  through  successive  complications 
of  organic  matter — from  the  gelatinous  and  scarcely  ani- 
malised  substance  of  such  creatures  as  the  polypes  and  the 
infusoria — which,  as  Lamarck  observes,  has  little  more  than 
the  consistence  and  colom'  of  water^and  is  incapable  of  making 
a  soup  that  would  be  nourishing  and  strengthening  to  man 
— to  the  more  complex  and  highly  animalised  flesh  of  birds 
anST mammals.'  And  not  in  substance  only,  but  in  structure 
and  form  also,  we  note  the  same  manner  of  progress  through 
multiplying  complexities  and  specialisations  from  simple 
forms  of  organism,  seemingly  homogeneous  in  substance,  to 
the  most  complex  organisms  with  their  varieties  of  elemental 
tissues^^their  intricate  combinations  of  tissues  into  organs, 
and  their  intimate  physiological  union  of  organs.  There 
has  been  a  progressive  exaltation  of  matter,  a  more  and 
more  complex  involution  of  it,  an  ascending  transpeciation, 
so  to  speak,  as  the  foundation  and  condition  of  that  process 
of  a  higher  becoming  of  things  which  we  call  evolution :  in 
fact,  it  comes  to  this  in  the  intimate  and  essential  relations 
of  organic  and  inorganic  nature,  that  there  is  not  an  organised 
living  creature  that  does  not  presuppose  and,  as  it  were, 
involve  the  whole  history  of  the  earth  antecedent  to  it. 
Therefore,  instead  of  being  satisfied  with  one  process  of  so- 
called    evolution,   we   ought  perhaps   rather   to   recognise, 

*  '  La  chair  et  le  sang  des  mammif  eres  et  des  oiseaux  sont  les  matieres  les 
plus  composees  et  les  plus  animalisees  que  Ton  puisse  obtenir  des  parties 
molles  des  animaux ;  aussi,  apres  les  poissons,  ces  matieres  se  degradent  progres- 
sivement  au  point  que  dans  les  radiaires  moUasses,  dans  les  polypes,  et  surtout 
dans  les  infusoires,  le  fluide  essentiel  n'a  plus  que  la  consistance  et  la  couleur 
de  I'eau  et  que  les  chairs  de  ces  animaux  n 'off rent  plus  qu'une  matiere 
gelatineuse,  k  peine  animalisee.  Le  bouillon  que  Ton  f  erait  avec  de  pareilles 
chairs  ne  serait,  sans  doute,  guere  nourrissant  et  fortifiant  pour  I'homme  qui  en 
ferait  usage.' — Lamarck,  Philosophie  zoologique,  vol.  i.  p.  216. 


132  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

investigate,  and  describe  three  processes — namely,  (a)  In- 
volution, (&)  Evolution,  and  (c)  Dissolution;  which  processes, 
though  three  when  viewed  in  relation  to  individual  parts, 
are  not  three,  but  three  aspects  of  one  process,  when  viewed 
in  relation  to  the  embracing  whole.* 

Two  leading  facts,  then,  and  for  us  ultimate  facts,  which 
it  behoves  us  to  apprehend  and  firmly  fix  in  mind,  are — first, 
that  there  has  been  what  we  may  call  a  nisus  of  evolution  in 
nature,  and,  secondly,  that  progressive  transpeciations  of 
matter  have  been  events  of  it.  Continuity  of  nature  certainly, 
but  as  certainly  not  of  kind  in  nature ;  for  the  continuity  is 
of  different  kinds,  therefore  in  some  sort  a  discontinuity,  a 
new  kind  springing  from  the  basis  of  the  old  kind  :  not  con- 
tinuity by  homogeneous  but  by  heterogeneous  generation. 
A  new  chemical  compound  with  new  properties  was  a  new 
thing  when  it  appeared  first ;  though  it  presupposed  the  ele- 
ments that  united  to  form  it,  and  therefore  had  a  continuity 
of  being  with  them,  its  new  function  was  not  the  sum  or 
mechanical  effect  of  the  co-operation  of  their  properties ; 
it  was  quite  a  special  power  that  might  properly  be  said 
to  have  its  autonomy  or,  so  to  speak,  its  spontaneity.  It  is 
vain  to  ask  why  it  is  so ;  we  must  observe  what  has  taken 
place,  accept  that  as  ultimate,  and  be  satisfied  to  trace  how 
it  is  so.  In  like  manner  must  we  accept  as  ultimate  facts 
other  steps  in  the  transpeciation  of  matter  and  energy : 
organic  matter  from  that  which  is  not  organic,  life  from 
not-life,  reason  and  will  from  sensibilities  that  are  not 
reason  and  will,  sensibility  from  simple  irritability,  con- 
sciousness from  that  which  is  not  conscious ;  for  everywhere 
it  is  the  same  problem  that  meets  us — namely,  from  the 
lower  to  make  the  higher,  from  that  which  is  not  to  obtain 
that  which  is.  It  is  no  real  inconsistency  to  accept  two 
views  that  are  sometimes  opposed  to  one  another  as  contra- 
dictory— namely,  the  opinion  of  the  essential  continuity  of 

•  Lamarck  enunciates  the  notion  of  involution  as  the  complement  of  his 
doctrine  of  the  transformation  of  species.  The  more  carefully  one  reads  his 
works,  the  more  one  realises  with  surprise  what  inadequate  justice  has  yet 
been  done  to  this  great  pioneer,  who  for  so  long  a  time  was  hardly  known 
except  by  a  ridiculous  travesty  of  his  doctrine. 


INVOLUTION  AND  EVOLUTION.  133 

existences  and  events  in  nature,  in  simple  virtue  of  the  agency 
and  properties  of  matter ;  and  the  opinion  that  the  so-called 
continuity  is  really  a  succession  of  creations  through  new 
involutions  of  matter.  The  process  is  not,  properly  speaking, 
an  evolution,  unless  evolution  be  complemented  by  a  worked- 
out  theory  of  involution,  but  an  epigenesis.  Certainly  the 
most  exact  and  complete  mathematics  of  quantity  will  not 
avail  to  explain  qualities. 

At  some  vastly  remote  period  of  the  world's  history — a 
period  so  remote  that  the  distance  can  hardly  take  definite 
form  in  a  mental  conception — non-living  matter  reached 
such  a  complexity  of  intimate  combinations  and  was  in  such 
fitting  external  conditions  that  it  underwent  what  was  then 
an  extraordinary  transformation  into  living  matter.  Theo- 
logians will  not  care  nowadays  to  dispute  the  transforma- 
tion, if  it  be  granted  that  the  event  was  the  immediate  work 
of  divine  interposition,  a  direct  creative  act.  Once  formed, 
living  matter  has  the  property  of  perpetuating  and  increas- 
ing itself  by  taking  into  itself  non-living  matter,  converting 
it  into  its  kind — assimilating  it,  as  it  is  said — and  so 
making  it  vital ;  not  otherwise  than  as  a  spark  of  fire,  once 
it  has  with  great  pains  been  obtained,  grows  into  a  flame 
and  continues  to  spread  when  it  meets  with  suitable  aliment. 
The  ease  and  rapidity  with  which  now  is  effected  by  living 
matter  a  transformation  that  took  place  only  in  the  first 
instance  by  successive  steps  and,  as  it  were,  after  long  and 
slow  preparations,  must  be  attributed  to  the  fact  that  the 
small  vital  particle  contains  in  itself  and  supplies  actually 
in  its  function  the  essential  conditions  of  the  transmutation 
which  were  then  obtained  only  after  many  trials  and  chances, 
and  by  favour  perhaps  of  a  happy  coincidence.  So  in  un- 
known way  it  works  a  conversion  to  its  nature  by  the  infec- 
tion of  its  presence  and  influence.  I  use  the  example  of  a 
spark  of  fire  not  as  an  explanation,  but  as  a  comparison,  in 
order  to  assist  the  conception  of  what  takes  place ;  for  as 
the  fire  raises  the  matter  near  it  to  such  a  temperature  that 
it  catches  fire,  or  as  an  orator's  enthusiasm  so  inflames  the 
enthusiasm  of  his  audience  that  they  flare  up  ;  so  the  particle 
of  living  matter  contains,  concentrated  in  its  minute  but 


134  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

complex  compass,  and  supplies  in  its  living  energy,  tlie  con- 
currence of  conditions  necessary  for  the  transformation  of 
non-living  aliment  into  its  own  living  nature.  On  tlie  one 
hand,  then,  those  who  see  a  miracle  in  the  first  appearance 
of  living  matter  on  the  earth  are  bound  to  see  a  miracle  in 
the  history  of  each  particle  of  dead  matter  which  a  living 
thing  converts  into  its  own  nature  ;  on  the  other  hand,  those 
who  see  in  the  new  event  nothing  more  than  an  ordinary 
operation  of  matter,  ought  not  to  delude  themselves  by  a 
misuse  of  the  word  ordinary  to  describe  that  which,  when  it 
took  place  for  the  first  time,  was  certainly  a  very  extra- 
ordinary operation  of  matter. 

The  elements  of  the  universe  being  what  they  are,  the 
combination  of  them  into  a  living  molecule  was  inevitable  at 
some  time  or  another  in  some  place  or  another.     For  if  the 
number  of  these  elements  be  finite  and  constant,  and  their 
properties  everywhere  the  same,  as  our  experience  of  them 
in  suns  and  stars  warrants  us  to  believe  they  are,  we  have 
the  right  to  suppose  that  an  infinite  number  of  combinations 
of  them  has  taken  place  in  the  infinite  time  and  space  that 
have  been  available  for  such  operations;    and  therefore  it 
would  follow  that  somewhere  or  other,  at  sometime  or  other, 
there  has  been  a  realisation  of  every  possible  combination 
and  development  of  matter.     Not  of  chemical  matter  only, 
be  it  understood,  but  of  matter  in  its  highest  known  form  as 
the  substratum  of  sensation  and  thought ;  for  then,  as  now, 
in  the  evolutional  ascent  sensation  must  have  appeared  with 
the  attainment  of  a  certain  complexity  of  the  fitting  organi- 
sation, and  thought  of  the  same  quality  as  exists  now  must 
have  followed  organic  combinations  having  the  same  quali- 
ties as  now.     We  do  not  discover  the  differential  calculus  in 
the   Amoeba — indeed,  we  are  persuaded  that   there  was  a 
time  when  the  Amoeba  was  and  the  differential  calculus  was 
not;  but  we  are  perfectly  sure  that,  the  conditions  of  the 
earth  having  been  what  they  were,  the   discovery  of  the 
differential  calculus  was  inevitable  some  time  in  the  chain 
of  organic  events.     For  anything  we  know  to  the  contrary, 
nay  conformably  to   the   probabilities   of  all    that   we   do 
know,  it  may  have  been  discovered  thousands  of  times  in 


INVOLUTION  AND  EVOLUTION.  135 

thousands  of  other  planets ;  in  which  in  the  course  of  an  infi- 
nite past  every  possible  composition  of  matter  and  every  pos- 
sible conception  of  mind  have  very  likely  been  realised  over 
and  over  again.  There  and  then,  as  here  and  now,  those 
combinations  of  elements  that  were  most  stable  would  endure 
and  become  the  basis  of  still  more  complex  combinations,  and 
so  the  whole  series  of  events  follow  in  inevitable  order ;  the 
differential  calculus  at  the  proper  time,  as  certainly  as  the 
coming  into  being  of  an  organic  molecule  when  the  fulness 
of  its  time  was  come.  And  seeing  that  organic  matter,  once 
it  has  come  into  being,  sustains  and  increases  itself  by  prey- 
ing upon  other  organic  matter,  there  must  needs  ensue  in 
due  course  all  the  horrible  consequences  of  the  struggle  for 
existence  on  earth.  What  an  overwhelming  reflection! 
That  the  same  animal  ferocity  in  pursuing,  killing  and 
devouring  through  all  the  forms  of  animal  life ;  the  same 
human  vices,  miseries,  cruelties  and  crimes  that  have  filled 
the  earth  with  groans  and  lamentations  through  untold 
ages ;  the  same  inadequate  notions  and  abortive  struggles ; 
the  same  fruitless  aspirations  and  prayers  that  have  been 
little  more  than  cries  of  conscious  impotence; — that  all  these 
things  have  been  many  times  in  the  infinite  past  of  being,  as 
the  result  of  the  same  organic  combinations  that  prevail 
on  earth  now,  and  prevail  also  perhaps  at  this  moment  in 
more  than  one  of  the  infinite  multitudes  of  worlds  that  are 
scattered  through  infinite  space !  So  may  it  be  that  when 
the  high-souled  poetic  being  gazes  into  the  blue  deep  of 
heaven  on  a  cloudless  night,  rapt  away  from  things  of  earth 
in  a  transport  of  ineffable  ecstasy,  and  is  thrilled  with  mys- 
terious sympathies  that  bring  him  into  sacred  communion 
of  spirit  with  something  that  he  sees  not,  apprehends  not, 
thinks  not,  but  feels  is  there,  he  is  experiencing  the  dim  in- 
timations of  a  nearer  kinship  than  he  suspects. 

May  we  not  discern  a  dim  perception  or  vague  adumbra- 
tion of  this  eternally  recurring  evolution  and  dissolution  of 
worlds  and  beings  in  the  old  and  widely  spread  doctrine  of  a 
transmigration  of  souls  ?  It  was  one  of  the  traditions  of  the 
Jlabbins  that  those  who  had  been  the  guiltiest  of  the  guilty, 
and  who  had  made  themselves  abominable  in  the  siffht  of 


136  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

heaven  by  their  sins,  were  chased  round  the  world  by  evil 
spirits  until  the  time  decreed  was  accomplished.  Then  they 
sank  into  dust  and  ashes,  the  lowest  depth  of  existence. 
Next,  in  another  beginning  of  existence  they  became  clay 
and  took  the  nature  of  stone  and  of  minerals;  and  from 
thence  they  rose  to  become  water,  air  and  fire,  floating  in 
the  cloud,  rushing  in  the  whirlwind,  rolling  in  the  thunder. 
After  this  they  entered  into  vegetable  existence,  springing 
to  life  in  grass  and  flowers,  trees  and  shrubs.  Ages  on  ages 
were  consumed  in  these  successive  ti-ansformations ;  for  in 
them  units  of  time-reckoning  might  well  be,  not  by  revolu- 
tions of  planets,  but  by  the  births  and  deaths  of  solar  sys- 
tems. The  next  change  was  into  animal  life,  in  which  as 
beast,  bird,  reptile,  fish  and  insect,  in  the  waters,  in  the  air, 
on  the  ground  and  underground,  they  pursue  and  are  pursued, 
rend  with  tooth  and  claw  and  are  rended,  destroy  and  are 
destroyed,  through  countless  seons.  At  last  they  are  suffered 
to  ascend  into  the  rank  of  human  beings  once  more.  But 
their  ascent  there  is  step  by  step :  they  are  first  slaves  un- 
dergoing unspeakable  toils,  privations  and  tortures,  so  that 
their  life  is  a  long  longing  to  die ;  dying  in  full  time,  they 
commence  life  again  in  a  higher  rank,  being  free,  but  it  is 
a  hard  life  of  toil,  of  poverty,  of  war,  of  dungeons,  of  bloody 
superstitions,  of  worship  of  idols,  in  abasement  and  ignor- 
ance. To  them  also  in  the  end  comes  the  release  of  death  ; 
then  the  final  change  ensues,  and  they  enter  the  highest 
rank  of  mankind,  becoming  Israelites,  the  chosen  people  to 
whom  has  been  given  the  promise  of  universal  dominion. 
The  end  is  accomplished :  the  long  cycle  of  the  travail  of 
matter  through  eternity  has  reached  its  climax,  having  cul- 
minated in  the  highest  specimen  of  mankind — a  good  Jew. 
See  the  grim  irony  of  events  !  When  Jesas  Christ  came,  a 
Jew  of  the  Jews,  they  rejected  and  crucified  Him. 

Let  us  turn  back  to  the  main  line  of  our  inquiry.  It 
has  been  shown  that  the  lesson  of  material  continuity  witL 
progressive  complication,  which  is  taught  by  the  ascent  from 
simple  binary  compounds  to  ternary  compounds,  from  tern- 
ary compounds  to  still  more  complex  compounds,  and  from 
these  to  the  exceeding  complex  composition  of  nerve-element, 


INVOLUTION  AND   EVOLUTION.  137 

is  plainly  taught  also  by  the  development  of  organic  life. 
An  organism  and  its  medium,  when  they  have  reached  a 
certain  fitness  of  one  to  the  other  and  hit  upon  the  happy 
concun-ence  of  conditions,  combine,  so  to  speak,  to  make  a 
new  start,  the  initial  step  of  a  more  complex  organism. 
This  initial  variation  which,  profiting  by  what  is  called 
natural  selection,  undergoes  gradual  development,  is  an 
original  fact  that  we  cannot  explain.  Call  it  an  internal 
principle  of  evolution,  if  you  will,  though  it  is  doubtful  whether 
matters  are  made  any  more  clear  thereby.  To  call  it  an 
accidental  variation  is  hardly  well,  since  there  is  no  such 
event  as  accident,  and  in  any  case  that  is  ill  called  an 
accident  which  issues  finally  in  such  a  definite  and  special 
product  as  a  new  organism :  it  is  almost  equivalent  to  call- 
ing man  himself  an  accident.  Natural  selection  affords  us 
_an  explanation  of  the  survival  of  the  variation  once  it  has 
_been  made,  but  no  explanation  of  the  organic  start  itself  nor 
of  its  progressive  increase.  It  is  in  the  inmost  depths  of 
physiology,  in  the  most  intimate  physico-chemical  processes 
that  take  place  between  the  internal  properties  of  the 
organism  and  the  external  stimuli  of  the  environment,  that 
we  must  search  for  the  origin  of  the  initial  variation  and  of 
its  growth  by  exercise.  All  we  know  and  understand  at 
present  is  that  it  is  the  observed  tendency  of  organic 
matter  to  break  into  varieties,  thousands  of  which  probably 
occur  and  come  to  naught,  in  the  absence  of  fit  surroundings 
to  preserve  them,  for  each  one  that  survives  and  is  fixed  with 
the  lapse  of  time.  Everywhere  we  observe  evidence  of  such 
variations :  no  two  faces,  no  two  voices,  no  two  treads,  no 
two  objects  in  living  nature  are  ever  exactly  alike ;  in  the 
phenomena  of  heredity  the  operation  of  a  law  of  variation 
is  as  manifest  as  the  operation  of  the  law  of  inheritance  of 
like  qualities.  What  wonder  that  such  variations  occur 
often  in  the  unstable  and  extremely  plastic  substance  of 
nascent  organic  matter  ? 

The  initial  structure  of  the  new  variation  is  an  embodi- 
ment of  the  special  conditions  of  the  environment,  an 
organic  involution  of  them,  and  is  therefore  prepared  by  its 

nature  to  flourish  in  similar  fitting  conditions;  for  as   the 
10 


138  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

living  particle,  once  formed,  contains  in  itself  and  supplies 
the  essential  conditions  of  tlie  transformation  of  suitable 
non-living  matter  into  its  kind,  so  this  new  embodiment 
contains  in  its  structure  and  supplies  in  its  function  the 
essential  conditions  of  a  further  increase,  and  grows  aptly 
to  the  mode  of  its  exercise.  That  is  the  real  meaning  of 
Lamarck's  doctrine  that  the  want  or  need  generates  the 
effort,  and  the  effort  or  exercise  the  faculty.  The  first  step 
once  made,  the  initial  combination  of  organism  and  medium, 
the  increase  will  be  comparatively  easy,  for  here,  as  in 
morals,  it  is  the  first  step  only  that  costs ;  it  will  increase, 
by  reason  of  its  embodied  conditions,  in  external  surround- 
ings that  would  not  have  been  sufficient  to  generate  it, 
although  it  will  certainly  perish  in  surroundings  that  are 
not  adequately  adapted  to  it ;  as  a  fire  will  go  out  when  it 
has  not  proper  fuel,  or  as  a  gill-breathing  animal  will  expire 
in  the  air.  Notwithstanding  this  advantage  of  intrinsic 
structural  conditions,  however,  it  is  exti-emely  probable  that 
multitudes  of  variations  are  born  only  to  fade  timelessly, '  no 
sooner  blown  than  blasted,'  just  as  the  great  majority  of  all 
sorts  of  seeds  come  to  naught ;  just  as  many  bright  thoughts 
not  caught  and  fixed  at  the  moment  pass  for  ever ;  just  as 
among  thousands  upon  thousands  of  stars  and  planets  one 
only  perhaps  here  and  there  comes  to  aught.  To  infinite 
Power,  with  infinite  time  and  infinite  space  at  its  disposal,  it 
is  manifestly  no  greater  matter  to  waste  planets  than  to 
waste  seeds. 

It  is  not  a  very  profitable  discussion  whether  function 
developes  structure  or  structure  developes  function,  as  it  is 
not  a  profitable  discussion  why  the  organism  makes  the  first 
start  of  a  new  development  which  the  surroundings  after- 
wards nurse  into  completeness.  Both  questions  seem  to  be 
based  upon  the  notion  of  a  living  organism  as  an  indi- 
viduality that  has  existence  apart  from  its  medium.  In 
reality  it  has  nothing  of  the  kind.  We  make  the  abstrac- 
tion in  thought,  but  there  is  no  corresponding  separation  in 
nature.  A  similar  discussion  has  been  raised  as  to  whether 
social  morahty  is  the  basis  of  individual  morality,  or  whether 
individual  morality  has  preceded  social  morality ;  as  if  indi- 


INVOLUTION  AND  EVOLUTION,  139 

vidual  morality  could  be  at  all  except  in  relation  to  a  social 
environment,  or  a  society  he  witliout  individuals.  Morality 
would  have  no  meaning  to  a  man  living  alone  on  a  planet 
which  he  had  all  to  himself:  he  could  not  be  virtuous  there 
any  more  than  a  woman  would  be  hysterical  who  was  placed 
in  similar  circumstances ;  or  than  a  sole  Supreme  Being 
who  has  the  universe  to  Himself  can  be  virtuous  or  vicious. 

Let  us  endeavour  to  apprehend  as  closely  as  possible  the 
formation  of  a  new  organic  start.  A  structural  variation 
appears,  be  it  the  most  minutely  initial  imaginable.  Certainly 
it  could  not,  before  it  was  formed,  function  as  part  of  the 
organism,  and  must  have  preceded  its  function  in  the  order  of 
development,  since  function  is  the  definite  energy  of  structure 
of  definite  form ;  that  form  being  itself  the  result  of  the  com- 
bining properties  of  the  simple  and  complex  compounds  that 
constitute  the  structure  in  their  relations  to  the  environment. 
The  unloosing  of  the  energies  of  the  compounds  by  their  de- 
composition and  the  unified  action  of  the  liberated  energy, 
as  determined  by  the  form  of  structure,  will  be  the  function. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  is  a  sure  matter  of  daily  observation 
that  structure  grows  to  the  mode  of  its  exercise,  and  wastes 
when  it  is  not  exercised — that  is  to  say,  that  function  de- 
velopes  structure  in  the  line  of  its  activity ;  a  plus  replace- 
ment of  expended  organic  material  being  growth,  a  minus 
replacement  thereof  waste.  Here,  then,  Ave  are  brought  to 
a  pretty  pass,  which  looks  very  like  an  impasse.  We  may 
be  permitted  to  ask  ourselves,  however,  whether  at  bottom 
anything  more  wonderful  has  happened  than  happened 
when  a  new  chemical  compound,  or  an  organic  molecule, 
was  formed  for  the  first  time,  which  has  ever  since  in- 
creased and  multiplied. 

Nutrition  is  a  succession  of  generations,  and  generation 
is  fundamentally  a  continuance  of  nutrition.  "We  need  to 
get  rid  of  the  artificial  separation  that  we  make  between 
organism  and  medium,  and  to  cultivate  the  conception  of  an 
essential  interaction.  The  proper  influences  or  fitting  co- 
incidences of  the  medium  are  as  essential  a  part  of  the  con- 
stitution of  the  new  structural  start  as  are  the  intrinsic 
conditions  or  properties  of  the  organic  structure  from  which 


140  WILL  r^  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

it  proceeds ;  it  is  indeed  tlie  material  embodiment,  in  tlie 
most  complex  and  concentrated  form,  of  the  intrinsic  organic 
conditions  and  of  tlie  extrinsic  conditions  of  the  medium — 
an  involution,  so  to  speak,  of  the  two  complex  factors. 
Always  is  it  necessary  to  have  envelopment  before  you  can 
have  tZevelopment,  to  fold  in  before  yon  can  unfold.  The 
smallest  particle  of  protoplasm  that  ever  came  into  being, 
came  into  being  through  the  union  of  immanent  and  influent 
conditions,  and  it  grew  afterwards  by  the  continuance  of  a 
similar  process  of  combination  under  vastly  more  favourable 
auspices ;  but  it  was  able  to  grow  in  that  fashion  from  pre- 
ceding protoplasm  only  because  the  latter  carried  incorporate 
in  its  natui-e,  as  immanent  properties,  the  antecedent  influent 
external  conditions  that  were  necessary  to  its  first  produc- 
tion. The  exercise  of  function  being  the  giving  out  or  un- 
loosing of  those  combined  internal  and  external  conditions, 
the  unfolding  from  within,  by  a  self-disintegration,  of  the 
coincident  conditions  within  and  without  that  combined 
in  the  first  instance  to  form  the  new  variation,  these  natu- 
rally promote  further  material  embodiments — that  is  to  say, 
further  increase  of  structure.  In  regard  of  relative  priority 
of  appearance  of  structure  and  function  then,  the  proper 
answer  would  perhaps  be  that  the  new  function  came  first  as 
the  function  of  concurrent  organism  and  medium,  being 
more  or  less  vague  and  tentative;  and  that  the  material 
embodiment  in  the  initial  variation,  surviving  by  its  fitness 
to  the  conditions,  became  the  structural  basis  of  definite, 
purposive,  and  less  dependent  function  of  the  organism. 

It  is  easier  to  entertain  the  general  notion  of  a  process 
of  involution  than  it  is  to  put  forth  an  intelligible  exposition 
of  it.  Making  use  of  every  aid,  in  order,  if  possible,  to  make 
the  conception  clear  and  definite,  I  would  particularly  point 
out  that  in  the  formation  of  the  primitive  organic  particle, 
and  in  each  successive  formation  of  more  complex  organic 
matter,  a  process  has  taken  place  that  at  bottom  is 
identical  with  what  we  see  going  on  and  exemplified  now 
in  every  conscious  mental  acquisition.  For  what  happens 
in  this  case?  Observation  of  the  new  conditions  that 
present  themselves,  and  in   due   course   adaptive   reaction 


INVOLUTION  AND  EVOLUTION.  Ul 

to  them ;  sucli  process,  ingoing  and  outgoing,  being  at  the 
foundation  of  the  faculties  we  call  perception  and  judgment ; 
so  we  make  a  veritable  assimilation  of  them,  and  therein  a 
gain  to  ourselves  of  mental  faculty.  The  process  is  gradual 
and  tentative  at  first,  but  it  becomes  exact  and  perfect  by- 
practice.  Now  the  underlying  condition  of  such  acquired 
faculty  or  function  certainly  is  an  organic  basis  of  gradually 
formed  structure,  the  specialty  of  which  structure  is  deter- 
mined by,  embodies,  and  signifies  the  composite  result  of  the 
internally  immanent  and  the  special  externally  influent 
conditions.  Thus  conscious  function  helps  to  throw  light 
upon  the  dark  and  hidden  processes  of  purely  organic 
function,  for  it  is  with  the  increments  and  developments  of 
the  simple  organic  particle  as  it  is  at  bottom  with  our  mental 
increments  and  developments. 

The  reaction  of  the  simplest  living  matter  to  the  external 
stimulus  is  simple  and  direct,  but  it  is  obvious  that  with  each 
of  those  above-mentioned  increments  of  gain,  they  being 
embodiments  of  simple  reactions,  the  reaction  becomes  less 
direct  and  simple ;  and  it  is  further  obvious  that  with 
successive  additions,  especially  when  the  additions  are  deve- 
lopments, the  reaction  becomes  more  and  more  circuitous 
and  complicated ;  the  determinants  of  action  mainly  within, 
the  occasions  without.  The  organism  has  become  a  maga- 
zine of  embodied  relations.  In  its  structure  are  stored  up 
potentially  the  multitudinous  simple  actions  and  reactions 
between  organic  substance  and  medium — ordered  struc- 
turalisations  that  make  its  increasing  complexity ;  they 
are  there  ready  to  unfold  in  energy  on  the  occasion  of  a  slight 
and  very  indirect  stimulus  ;  not  otherwise  than  as  the  mind 
of  a  man  of  the  world  contains  the  gains  of  the  experience 
by  which  he  has  profited  on  his  way  through  life,  and  holds 
them  in  store  ready  for  use  when  the  occasion  demands.  A 
complex  organism  is  the  embodiment  of  such  involutions 
from  the  beginning  of  life  on  earth  to  the  beginning  of  its 
life.  The  spontaneities  and  autonomies,  so-called,  of  organic 
structures  and  beings  have  been  thus  fashioned.  If  traced  back 
to  their  genesis,  if  undone,  so  to  speak,  in  the  reverse  order 
in  which  they  were  done,  the  research  would  bring  us  at  last 


142  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

to  the  simple  fact  of  the  primitive  action  and  reaction.  In 
the  least  portion  of  an  organic  structure  the  immediate 
relation  is  immanent ;  it  can  only  be  directly  and  openly 
dispensed  with  on  any  occasion  of  function,  because  it 
is,  so  to  speak,  capitalised  there ;  and  it  is  by  reason  of 
such  funded  stores  that  an  external  stimulus  that  otherwise 
might  seem  slight  and  inadequate  is  adequate  to  produce 
large  effects. 

The  tendency  at  the  present  day  is  perhaps  to  lay  undue 
stress  on  the  environment  as  cause  of  the  variations  that 
take  place  in  an  organism,  and  in  some  respects  the  term 
*  natural  selection '  may  have  helped  to  enhance  the 
tendency ;  for  the  common  notion  of  natural  selection  is  apt 
to  be  that  of  an  external  active  power  which  seizes  on  the 
organism  and  compels  it  to  adapt  itself  in  special  ways. 
In  reality,  of  course,  natural  selection  merely  expresses  the 
fact  that  the  organism  survives  which  has  made  the  fitting 
adaptation ;  and  it  is  exactly  the  adaptation  that  needs  to  be 
explained.  Indeed,  the  word  adaptation  itself  is  one  which, 
if  used  by  theologians,  would  probably  be  condemned  as 
being  of  anthropomorphic  taint,  and  implying  the  application 
of  conscious  experience  of  human  action  to  material  events. 
To  search  out  and  discover  the  exact  physico-chemical  con- 
ditions and  events  of  a  particular  process  of  adaptation — that 
is  the  real  problem ;  and  the  solution  of  it  would  be  of  more 
scientific  value  than  volumes  of  vague  disquisition  concerning 
adaptation.  It  is  necessary,  in  this  relation,  to  be  on  guard 
against  falling  into  the  easy  delusion  that  the  application  of 
new  terms  to  old  facts  is  an  addition  to  our  knowledge  of 
the  facts  :  evolution  and  environment,  for  example,  are  large 
words  of  swelling  sound  that  seem  to  be  charged  with  big 
meaning,  but  by  themselves  they  really  explain  no  more  than 
the  old  expressions  of  the  becoming  of  things  amidst  the 
things  around  them.  The  question  is  what  are  the  exact 
facts  that  such  general  words  signify ;  and  here  it  must  be 
confessed  that  an  aching  void  of  meaning  often  appears.^ 

'  Darwin  established  the  doctrine  of  evolution  on  a  scientific  basis  by 
infinitely  patient  labour  of  observation  and  thought ;  but  it  has  been  the  fate 
of  his  discovery,  as  it  is  the  fate  of  most  epoch-marking  discoveries,  to  be 


INVOLUTION  AND  EVOLUTION.  143 

If  a  complex  organism  embodies  in  its  nature  the  en- 
vironments of  all  organism  that  come  in  the  order  of  de- 
velopment between  it  and  the  simplest  form  of  organism — if 
it  be,  so  to  saj,  a  magazine  of  such  involutions — so  that  in 
dealing  with  its  external  relations  and  internal  correlations 
we  are  dealing  with  the  historical  incorporation  of  a  multi- 
tude of  past  environments,  it  is  obvious  that  a  general  state- 
ment of  the  action  of  the  environment  to  produce  a  variation 
is  too  vague  to  have  the  smallest  scientific  value.  Suppose 
some  thousands  of  chemical  compounds  mixed  together  in 
states  of  highly  unstable  equilibrium,  but  having  the  ex- 
ternal formal  equilibrium  of  an  organism ;  then  suppose 
some  impulse  from  without  to  upset  the  unstable  equilibrium, 
so  that  the  compounds  go  instantly  into  a  turmoil  of  decom- 
pounding, recompounding  and  new  compounding,  some  in 
more,  others  in  less  stable  combinations ;  what  an  empty 
pretence  of  information  it  would  be  to  say  that  the  possible 
multitude  of  ensuing  new  combinations  and  the  consequent 
modification  of  the  external  relations  of  the  formal  whole 
were  due,  in  any  direct  sense,  to  the  influence  of  the  en- 
vironment !  And  yet  we  have  made  the  supposition  of  a 
state  of  things  falling  far  short  of  that  which  prevails  in  a 
complex  organism ;  for  such  organism  is  a  formal  equilibrium 
of  countless  multitudes  of  internal  molecular  motions,  that 
are  ever  active,  changing  every  moment,  combining  and 
separating,  neutralising  and  reinforcing,  as  complex  and 
incalculable  as  the  multitudinous  ripples  of  ocean.  The  im- 
mediate relations  of  organism  and  environment  may  perhaps 
be  the  least  part  of  our  difficulties,  when  we  have  made  any- 
thing of  it  in  the  way  of  exact  knowledge;  we  shall  have  to 
inquire  into  the  complex  and  intimate  correlations  of  its 
several  parts  and  functions,  whereby  variations  of  one  part 
entail  important  and  far-reaching  variations  in  other  parts, 
without  any  direct  action  of  the  environment.     Moreover, 

spun  into  many  vain  and  vapid  theories  by  speculative  disciples,  who,  not 
applying  themselves  to  patient  intercourse  with  facts,  use  a  few  ill-observed 
and  inadequately  apprehended  facts  as  the  occasions  of  speculative  applica- 
tions of  the  doctrine ;  whereby  it  naturally  does  not  fail  to  happen  that 
everything  in  the  world  is  capable  of  being  explained  by  it. 


144  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

in  this  complicated  business  it  is  plain  tliat  tlie  adaptation 
of  an  organism  to  its  present  environment  may  be  not  a 
useful  adaptation  of  tbe  organism  as  a  wbole,  but  tlie  par- 
ticular adaptation  of  a  variation  of  it,  the  development 
whereof  may  entail  correlated  inter-adjusting  changes  in  it 
that  are  not  progressions  but  retrogressions ;  not  really 
helpful  to  the  whole,  but  positively  hurtful  to  it  as  a  whole, 
and  so  calculated  to  arrest  its  higher  development  or  to 
promote  its  actual  degeneration. 

In  this  relation,  we  shall  do  well  to  reflect  on  the 
different  organic  stages  through  which,  in  its  course  of 
embryonic  development,  the  ovum  of  one  of  the  higher 
animals  passes  from  a  seemingly  homogeneous  and  scarcely 
visible  substance  to  the  complex  structure  of  its  mature 
form,  the  environment  all  the  while  being  the  same.  Its 
successive  variations  do  not  owe  much  apparently  in  those 
circumstances  to  natural  selection,  rather  would  they  appear 
to  make  their  own  election.  No  doubt  development  in  this 
case  repeats  the  different  stages  of  descent  when  the  en- 
vironment was  different,  and  the  successive  stages  thereof 
are  so  many  evolutions  of  very  complex  involutions  that 
have  been  accomplished  in  the  successions  of  the  ages  ;  but 
that  does  not  alter  the  fact  that  the  very  remarkable  evolu- 
tion of  the  microscopic  germ  is  not  due  to  its  environment, 
but  to  occult  qualities  in  itself,  to  its  intrinsic  essence.  In 
its  nature  is  inscribed  the  architectural  plan  or  form  of  its 
development. 

The  lesson  which  the  example  teaches  is  that  always  the 
initial  variation  of  an  organism,  which  we  call  accidental 
because  its  causes  are  unknown,  and  the  form  of  develop- 
ment of  the  variation,  are  in  the  main  the  direct  inspira- 
tion of  the  organism  and  essentially  independent  of  its 
present  environment.  Without  doubt  the  fitting  external 
conditions  are  necessary  to  its  survival  and  growth,  but  they 
,  are  not  determinant  of  its  origin.  The  material  of  the 
difference  of  mass  between  the  acorn  and  the  oak  obviously 
comes  from  without — from  the  soil  and  from  the  atmosphere  ; 
but  it  is  the  acorn  that  contains  the  determining  conditions 
by  which  this  matter  has  been  transmuted  into  living  struc- 


INVOLUTION  AND  EVOLUTION. 

ture,  as  well  as  tlie  directing  form  after  which  it  has  beei 
constrained  to  fashion  itself — not  otherwise  than  as  the  form- 
following  repair  of  a  crystal  takes  place  in  a  suitable  solution 
— and  by  which  always  the  tree  is  forbidden  to  grow  up  unto 
heaven.  And  we  have  to  note  this :  that  not  only  has  the 
transmuting  power  been  multiplied  with  the  continual  con- 
versions of  non-living  into  living  matter,  but  that  each  new 
element  thus  added  i.&  vital  has  been  literally  informed  by 
the  pre-existing /orm,  and  so  transformed  as  to  become  a 
new  store  of  form.  In  like  manner,  a  variation  occurring  in 
each  of  two  differently  constituted  organisms  placed  in  the 
same  surroundings,  in  which  both  were  adapted  to  live,  would 
not  be  of  the  same  kind  and  take  the  same  course  of  develop- 
ment in  each  case — would  not,  in  fact,  grow  by  minute  incre- 
ments into  the  same  kind  of  new  organ.  Each  variation 
would  be  informed  by  the  special  antecedents  in  the  organism 
from  which  it  proceeded,  being  the  expression  of  the  corre- 
lation of  its  parts,  and  carrying  in  itself  the  formal  plan 
of  its  future  development :  would  nowise  be  moulded  help- 
lessly by  circumstances,  but  would  mould  circumstances 
helpfully.  Natural  selection  gives  account  only  of  the 
quantitative  increase,  it  gives  no  account  whatever  of  the 
qualitative  nature  of  the  new  variation. 

Thus  much  then  by  way  jf  showing  that  in  virtue  of  the 
autonomy  of  an  organism  there  is  what  we  may  call  an 
organic  spontaneity  manifesting  itself  in  variations  that 
are  certainly  not  due  to  the  surroundings,  but  which  must, 
in  order  to  survive,  meet  with  fit  surroundings.  The  bad 
side  of  this  tendency  to  variation  is  exemplified  by  the 
appearance  of  morbid  growths  and  other  diseased  products 
in  the  organism,  which,  if  the  medium  be  fit,  increase,  but, 
if  unfit,  dwindle  and  die ;  and  the  important  co-operation 
of  the  medium  is  well  shown  further  by  the  way  in  which 
infectious  germs  are  noxious  or  innocuous,  according  to  its 
states,  and  more  especially  by  the  way  in  which  some  such 
germs  may  be  cultivated  artificially  into  virulence  or  into 
innocence  outside  the  body,  according  to  the  media  in  which 
they  are  placed. 

Nor  is  it  to  be  overlooked  in  this  connection  that  a  like 


146  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

process  of  variation  is  manifest  in  mental  operations,  and  is 
at  the  foundation  of  the  development  of  new  ideas.  Given 
the  basis  of  good  mental  nutrition  and  respiration  in  a 
suitable  social  atmosphere,  and  there  take  place  from  time 
to  time  spontaneous  variations  testifying  to  the  autonomy 
of  the  organism.  It  is  mental  productivity  as  distinguished 
from  reproductivity ;  and  it  naturally  diminishes  as  age 
advances,  until  it  is  entirely  lost  in  old  persons,  because 
with  the  increasing  failure  of  their  vital  powers  there  is  no 
superfluous  nutrition  and  no  exuberant  energy  to  make  a 
variation.  The  most  striking  instance  of  productivity  in 
the  organic  sphere  and  in  its  intimately  related  mental 
sphere  is  seen  in  the  nature  and  operation  of  the  repro- 
ductive impulse,  which  in  the  individual  is  truly  a  sort  of 
organic  spontaneity ;  not  certainly  provoked  by  the  sensual 
pleasure  that  accompanies  its  gratification,  for  plants  practise 
sexual  congress  without  having  any  sensation,  and  animals 
and  human  beings  accomplish  it  before  they  know  the 
pleasure  it  brings.  Meanwhile  the  gratification  that  attends 
its  function  is  a  signal  justification  of  its  strong  and  blind 
impulse  ;  a  proof  also,  since  no  two  beings  are  exactly  alike, 
how  deep  in  the  heart  of  nature  lies  not  only  the  propa- 
gation of  life  but  also  the  production  of  variations  in  its 
propagation. 

The  tendency  to  variation  in  organic  beings  is  most 
manifest  in  man,  who  for  the  present  marks  the  organic 
culmination  of  nature,  and  most  manifest  in  his  highest 
developments — that  is,  in  the  functions  of  his  intellect  and 
imagination ;  though  it  may  be  a  question  whether  in  his 
physical  characters  the  tendency  be  not  rather  to  greater 
uniformity,  as  the  conditions  of  life  on  earth  are  becoming 
more  alike.  Through  the  great  changes  which  he  has  made 
on  its  surface  in  order  to  adapt  it  to  his  wants,  and  through 
the  dominating  and  unquestioned  ascendency  which  he  has 
long  conquered  for  himself,  all  other  branches  of  the  animal 
kingdom  have  had  their  development  checked  and  the  forms 
thereof  stereotyped  in  a  sterile  immobility.  The  energies  of 
organic  becoming  have  been  collected  and  absorbed  into  the 
channel  of  human   becoming.     Any  intellectual   or  moral 


INVOLUTION  AND  EVOLUTION.  147 

progress  on  the  part  of  animals,  or  any  advance  on  their 
remarkable  instincts — which  in  the  ingenious  adaptations  of 
means  to  end  stand  so  strangely  apart  from  the  poor  and 
unprogressive  character  of  their  present  intelligence,  like 
stereotyped  survivals  of  a  period  of  development  when  they 
possessed  higher  adaptive  powers  than  they  do  now — is 
rendered  impossible.  Only  in  those  animals  that  are  used 
by  man  to  subserve  his  wants,  and  cultivated  by  him  for 
the  purpose,  is  there  any  notable  tendency  to  survival  and 
variation.  There  is  no  animal  not  domestic  but  flies 
instantly  from  his  presence :  ages  of  pursuit  and  persecution 
have  made  that  the  urgent  self-conservative  instinct  of 
every  creature  that  shares  the  earth  with  him.  The  wild 
animals,  like  wild  men,  are  indeed  fast  coming  to  find 
themselves  without  a  medium  in  which  they  can  survive, 
since  it  is  impossible  for  them  to  accommodate  themselves 
to  the  medium  that  man  is  making  of  the  earth,  almost  all 
parts  of  which  he  now  either  cultivates  for  his  use  or 
traverses  for  his  needs  or  pleasure.  They  survive  as  antique 
monuments  of  past  climates,  past  soils,  past  conditions  of 
the  earth  at  past  geological  epochs,  of  which  in  their  day 
and  generation  they  were  doubtless  the  best  outcome ;  nay, 
perhaps,  each  the  best  and  most  beautiful  product,  if  con- 
sidered in  relation  to  its  proper  medium,  howbeit  that  in  a 
foreign  medium  and  age  some  of  them  appear  huge  mon- 
strosities and  anachronisms.  That  they  have  thus  lived  on 
into  an  epoch  of  the  world  which  has  long  outgrown  them, 
and  has  no  appreciation  of  their  beauty  and  fitness,  having  a 
quite  special  human  standard  of  its  own,  is  their  misfortune. 
Happily  for  them  they  are  not  disquieted  with  aspirations 
for  ideals  beyond  them ;  each  kind  holds  to  its  own  standard  ; 
and  the  rhinoceros  wisely  prefers  his  ugly  and  unwieldy 
consort  to  the  beauty  and  the  proportions  of  the  Venus  de 
Medici. 

It  is  not  only  that  the  dominating  ascendency  of  man 
prevents  progress  in  the  animals  below  him  that  are  not 
moulded  by  him  for  his  uses,  but  it  tends  to  produce  retro- 
gression in  them.  If  one  of  two  animals  of  the  same  kind 
or  of  nearly  allied  kinds  undergoes  a  variation  that  is  useful 


148  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

to  it  in  the  struggle  for  existence,  and  prospers  by  reason  of 
it,  tlie  advantage  it  lias  gained  does  not  count  to  the  other 
simply  as  the  deprivation  of  an  advantage,  but  it  is  a 
positive  disadvantage  to  it ;  inasmuch  as,  having  a  rival  that 
takes  and  occupies  the  higher  place,  it  is  now  driven  to  live 
a  lower  life,  to  lose  its  organic  aspirations,  and  by  degrees  to 
undergo  degradation.  The  conditions  of  its  existence, 
instead  of  being  open  and  propitious  to  development  on  its 
part,  are  now  made  unpropitious  and  positively  antagonistic 
by  the  repressive  presence  of  its  successful  competitor.  Let 
us  suppose,  by  way  of  illustration,  the  instances  of  man  and 
his  monkey-like  next-of-kin,  at  the  time  when,  descended 
from  a  common  stem,  their  ways  began  to  diverge.  It  is 
evident  that  when  the  legs  came  to  be  used  exclusively  for 
locomotion  instead  of  the  four  limbs,  and  thereby  the  hands 
were  left  free  for  grasping  purposes,  for  contrivance,  for 
defence,  for  gestures  of  expression,  and  for  other  special 
uses,  there  would  not  only  be  the  positive  gain  of  hands  to 
those  who  had  taken  this  path  of  progress ;  but  those  who 
had  not  done  so,  but  still  continued  to  employ  their  hands 
in  climbing,  would  become  more  and  more  dependent  upon 
that  use  of  them,  in  order  to  escape  the  competing  hostility 
of  the  superior  animal  now  in  possession  of  the  best  places, 
and  so  to  survive.  Thus  the  locomotive  uses  of  the  arms 
would  be  perpetuated  and  even  augmented,  and  the  higher 
uses  of  them  put  a  still  greater  distance  away ;  and  thus 
likewise  in  other  respects  each  more  in  the  special  progress 
of  man  would  be  a  more  in  the  special  path  of  the  monkey's 
diverging  progress.  The  same  law  reigns  in  the  struggle 
for  existence  among  the  races  of  men,  leading  to  the  de- 
generation and  extinction  of  the  inferior  races,  and  will 
continue  to  do  so  till  it  come  to  pass,  if  it  ever  shall  cone 
to  pass,  that  the  struggle  for  existence  is  checked  and  con- 
trolled by  the  growth  and  spread  of  the  sentiment  of  uni- 
versal brotherhood,  and  so  the  struggle  become  one  not  of 
individual  against  individual,  nor  of  race  against  race,  but 
one  of  the  whole  human  race,  compact  in  solidarity  of  feeling 
and  aim,  against  the  obstacles  that  hinder  its  progress 
towards  higher  and  higher  ideals. 


SECTION  IV. 

MENTAL    EVOLUTION    AND    THE    SOCIAL    MEDIUM. 

In  the  social  development  of  mankind  we  notice  and  mark 
the  same  sort  of  nisus  of  evolution  manifest  in  the  same 
kind  of  process  of  more  and  more  complex  becoming  that  has 
gone  on  in  inorganic  nature  and  in  the  development  of 
organic  life.  It  is  indeed  because  of  the  necessity  of 
carrying  the  conception  into  the  higher  region  of  social 
evolution,  and  of  making  use  of  it  there,  that  I  have  lingered 
upon  it  at  length  and  laboured  to  make  its  nature  plain. 
To  realise  the  full  meaning  of  physiological  facts,  to  get 
clear  and  exact  notions  of  them  in  their  mental  relations, 
is  a  difficult  business,  and  one  which  those  who  base 
psychology  on  the  method  of  introspection  seem  to  be  unable 
to  accomplish ;  it  is  impossible  for  them  so  much  as  to  grasp 
adequately  the  conception  of  a  living  organism,  because  of 
their  want  of  physiological  training.  They  persuade  them- 
selves they  get  it  from  text-books,  when  they  only  get  there 
much  such  a  vague  and  inadequate  conception  as  a  blind 
man  would  get  of  colours  from  a  description  of  them ;  and 
in  face  of  the  fruitful  facts  and  conceptions  which  present 
themselves,  but  which  they  cannot  assimilate  vitally,  they 
go  on  repeating  the  empty  phrases  of  their  schools.  Their 
real  relation  to  physiology  is  this :  they  demoralise  by  their 
psychological  spirit  what  they  appropriate  from  it,  and  they 
fail  to  impregnate  their  psychology  with  its  spirit.  Tell 
tiiem  that  the  social  feeling  operates  in  a  civilised  society 
to  make  a  person  feel  the  obligation  to  do  right,  and  they 
protest  against  the  statement  as  absurd,  because  they  can 
think  of  such  influence  only  as  deliberative,  reasoned,  pro- 
spective, self -regarding  ;  they  cannot  conceive  that  it  should 
be,  as  it  often  is,  immediate,  urgent,  self-denying,  instinctive. 
Were  they  to  be  at  the  pains  to  learn  and  grasp  adequately 
the  physiological  conception  of  an  organism  and  of  the  vital 
relations  therein  of  the  parts  to  the  whole  and  of  the  whole 
to  the  parts,  whereby,  all  being  members  of  one  body  and 


150  WILL   IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL   ASPECT. 

members  one  of  another,  tlie  whole  works  in  each  living 
element  and  each  living  element  in  the  whole,  they  would 
experience  no  such  difficulty ;  for  they  would  then  compre- 
hend that  an  individual  can  no  more  help  feeling  the 
constant  presence  and  influence  of  the  social  medium  in 
which,  for  which,  and  by  which  he  lives,  and  of  responding 
to  it,  than  an  organic  element  can  help  feeling  the  presence 
and  influence  of  the  organism  to  which  it  belongs. 

Reflecting  on  the  admirable  consensus  of  parts  in  the 
physiological  organism,  whereby  so  many  and  diverse 
elements  work  together  in  the  bonds  of  peace  and  in  unity 
of  spirit  for  the  good  of  the  whole,  may  one  not  propound 
incidentally  this  hypothesis — namely,  that  each  element 
contains  in  itself,  in  some  secret  and  incomprehensible  way, 
an  abstract  essence  of  the  whole  ?  For  if  a  minute  substance 
like  the  sperm-cell  or  germ-cell  contains  in  itself  the  essential 
characters  of  every  organic  element  of  the  body  from  which 
it  proceeds,  as  it  plainly  does ;  and  if  nutrition  is  at  bottom 
a  continuous  generation,  as  it  virtually  is ;  why  may  not 
each  specific  element  of  the  body  contain  in  abstract,  in  its 
innermost  nature,  the  essential  characters  of  all  the  diverse 
elements  that  are  organically  united  to  form  the  whole  ?  So 
perhaps  might  we  explain,  among  other  things,  the  singular 
occurrence,  in  morbid  cysts  in  the  breasts  and  other  parts  of 
the  body,  of  some  of  the  embryonic  structures  that  are 
ordinarily  met  with  only  as  products  of  normal  embryonic 
development  in  the  womb.  It  is  not  in  that  case  that  a 
nascent  germ-  or  sperm-cell  travels  to  these  distant  regions 
and  developes  there,  but  that  the  elements  of  tissue  in  these 
regions  have  had  awakened  in  them  the  dormant  properties 
which  they  possess  in  common  with  the  germ-  and  the  sperm- 
cell. 

In  the  progress  of  social  evolution  new  starts  or  varia- 
tions occur,  just  as  organic  starts  occur,  and  they  are  in  like 
manner  the  results  of  new  combinations  between  the  condi- 
tions immanent  in  the  individual  and  the  coincident  apt 
conditions  of  the  social  medium — the  intrinsic  and  the  in- 
fluent conditions.  Already  have  we  seen  how  an  individual 
developes  a  variation  when  he  takes  the  tone  of  manner  and 


MENTAL  EVOLUTION  AND  THE  SOCIAL  MEDIUM.         151 

feeling  and  thouglit  of  a  particular  sect  of  society  in  whicli 
he  lives.  Not witli  deliberate  method  but  almost  insensibly: 
he  observes  more  or  less  consciously  in  order  to  act;  by 
acting  habitually  after  a  certain  fashion,  he  becomes ;  and 
the  result  of  such  becoming  is  that  he  feels,  thinks  and  is  as 
one  of  the  sect.  Thenceforth  he  is  at  home  there,  because 
he  responds  congenially  to  the  impressions  of  the  circle,  and 
easily  gives  out  in  function  what  he  has  embodied  in  struc- 
ture— that  is  to  say,  displays  naturally  in  feeling,  thought 
and  conduct  that  which  he  has  made  part  of  his  character. 
But  when  a  new  thought  is  struck  out  for  the  first  time  in 
the  course  of  human  progress,  obviously  no  such  conscious  or 
senai-conscious  imitation  is  possible,  since  there  is  nothing 
to  imitate;  it  is  a  new  thing,  an  initial  variation  of  the 
social  organism,  which  cannot  have  been  learnt  anywhere. 
Whence  comes  it  ?  If  one  thing  is  shown  plainly  by  obser- 
vation of  the  course  of  development  of  human  thought,  it  is 
that  a  new  thought  is  in  the  air,  so  to  speak,  before  it  is  ap- 
prehended and  expressed,  and  that  the  aptly  constituted  and 
happily  placed  individual  becomes  the  organ  of  it ;  he  makes 
explicit  that  which  was  implicit  in  the  instinctive  pulses  of 
thought  and  feeling  around  him,  which  was  waiting  in  tension, 
as  it  were,  to  burst  into  blossom,  and  which  perhaps  had 
already  made  some  obscure  and  abortive  attempts  to  do  so. 
He  is  the  first  bud  to  blossom  successfully  on  a  branch 
where  others,  moved  by  a  common  pulse  of  life,  are  ready  to 
blossom  also.  Hence  it  comes  to  pass  that  a  new  thought 
is  seldom,  if  ever,  evolved  without  more  persons  than  one 
having  had  dim  intimations  or  more  or  less  distinct  concep- 
tions of  it,  and  that  endless  wranglings  concerning  the 
honour  of  priority  take  place  among  those  who,  ignoring 
their  intellectual  parentage  and  social  inspiration,  flatter 
themselves  they  have  any  special  merit  in  the  matter. 

Good  proof  of  the  essential  dependence  upon  the  medium, 
as  well  for  its  survival  as  for  its  origin,  is  afforded  by  the  fate 
which  befalls  a  new  idea  that  is  put  forth  before  its  time — that 
is  to  say,  before  the  social  medium  is  fitted  to  entertain  it ; 
when  perhaps  the  very  language  in  which  it  may  express 
itself  is  wanting,  and  a  fit  language  for  it  has  yet  to  be  framed 


152  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

and  learnt ;  for  it  produces  no  effect,  comes  into  the  world 
almost  stillborn,  is  neglected  and  soon  forgotten,  and  has 
to  be  rethought  and  proclaimed  afresh  years  or  generations 
afterwards.  Meanwhile  the  neglected  author  of  the  prema- 
ture birth  pays  the  penalty  of  being  in  advance  of  his  age 
by  being  thought  a  speculative  visionary  while  he  lives,  and 
afterwards,  when  his  idea  has  gained  acceptance  on  the 
authority  of  some  foster-parent,  by  being  acknowledged  to 
have  made  a  lucky  guess,  for  which  it  would  be  absurd  to 
award  him  any  credit;  all  the  real  merit  of  the  discovery 
being  assigned  to  him  who  proclaimed  it  at  a  time  when  it  met 
with  acceptance,  or  who  so  enforced  attention  to  it  by  elabo- 
rate demonstration  and  by  much  insistance  that  all  persons 
with  any  pretence  to  knowledge  were  forced  to  take  sides 
either  for  or  against  it.  Seldom,  if  ever,  has  there  been  a 
discovery  made  that  has  not  been  thus  anticipated ;  in 
fact  it  would  be  no  exaggeration  to  say  that  a  new  thought 
cannot  be  very  original  if  it  gets  itself  soon  accepted ;  and  it 
is  not  to  be  doubted  that  as  with  organic  variations,  so  with 
the  organs  of  new  ideas,  many  perish  before  the  one  survives 
to  bear  fruit.  A  well-worn  saying  respecting  a  scientific 
discovery  is  that  it  goes  through  three  stages — the  first 
stage,  when  it  is  ridiculed  as  absurd ;  the  second,  when  it  is 
denounced  as  contrary  to  religion  ;  and  the  third,  when  it  is 
declared  to  have  nothing  new  in  it.  Perhaps  a  truer 
statement  of  the  stages  of  its  development  would  be — first, 
that  in  which  it  is  announced  in  vague  outline  and  despised 
as  vain  speculation ;  the  second,  when  it  is  proved  and  esta- 
blished by  elaborate  observation  and  reasoning;  and  the 
third,  when  it  is  appropriated  by  the  speculative  philosophers 
and  prostituted  to  their  theoretical  uses. 

The  wonder  perhaps  is  that  a  new  idea  should  ever  he 
born  before  its  due  time — that  the  social  organism  should 
ever  develope  the  initial  organ  before  it  has  reached  the 
fitting  stage  of  evolution  to  maintain  it.  Somehow,  in  the 
continuous  flux  of  events  there  has  happened  the  favourable 
coincidence  of  external  conditions  and  of  a  happily  consti- 
tuted individual,  the  result  of  the  concurrence  being  a  new 
birth  of  thought ;  while  it  is  only  after  many  years  that  the 


MENTAL  EVOLUTION  AND  THE  SOCIAL  MEDIUM.         153 

general  level  of  knowledge  has  been  so  raised  as  to  admit  of 
the  promulgation  of  the  discovery  and  of  its  simultaneous 
verification.     Time  and  chance  happen  in  all  things;  w^here- 
fore  the  ancients  rightly  built  altars  and  dedicated  temples  to 
Fortune.     A  great  character  in  a  mean  sphere  shall  never 
be  heard  of  beyond  his  village,  though  he  may  be  a  notable 
figure  there,  while  the  qualities  of  a  poorer  character  on  a 
large  stage  shall  cause  his  name  to  echo  through  human 
history.      The  jealousies   of  Augustus    Csesar    and    Mark 
Antony  were  war  throughout  the  then  known  world:   the 
jealousies  of  two  men  of  equal  natural  capacities  to  those  of 
Augustus  Csesar  and  Mark  Antony  may  be  a  quarrel  in  a 
country  alehouse.     The  finest  tree  of  the  forest  is  the  pro- 
duct of  a  good  seed  falling  on  good  ground  in  propitious  sur- 
roundings, but  where  are  the  thousand  seeds  that  perished 
the  very  year  when  it  germinated,  every  one  of  which  would 
have  produced  as  fine  a  tree  as  it,  had  the  same  good  fortune 
befallen   them  ?     Has    not    many   an    inglorious   potential 
Newton  gazed  at  the  stars  and  only  thought  of  them,  if 
he  has  thought  of  them  at  all,  as  a  means  of  lighting  him 
home  at  night?      Those  who  see  not  a  miraculous  but  a 
natural  event  in  the  birth  and  progress  of  Christianity  will 
acknowledge  that,  had  its  founder  been  born  two  hundred 
years  before  he  was  born,  at  a  time  when  his  countrymen 
were  not  waiting  in  earnest  expectation  of  the  coming  of  a 
redeemer  of  Israel,  and  before  the  commencing  dissolution 
of  the  EiOman  Empire  yielded  a  soil  excellently  fit  for  its 
growth,  he  would  have  lived  and  died  in  a  mean  obscurity. 
Had  there  been  no  French  revolution,  and  had  Napoleon  not 
chanced  to  come  in  the  slackening  stream  of  it,  he  might 
well  have  ended  his  days  obscurely,  a  moody  and  discon- 
tented captain  of  artillery,  as  men  of  equal  capacity  to  his 
have  very  likely  often  done.     For  my  part,  I  have  certainly 
known  in  country  villages  men  of  more  native  power  of 
intellect,  of  larger  humour,  of  more  quietly  heroic  self-sup- 
pression, of  more  silent  grandeur  of  character,  of  more  solid 
human  qualities,  than  any  distinguished  man  that  I  have 
ever  met  with ;  he,  for  the  most  part,  is  actually  a  signally 

self-conscious  and  attenuated  person,  the  potential  gold  of 
11 


154  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

him  beaten  out  to  the  finest  possible  display,  and  much  de- 
moralised, whether  as  politician,  preacher,  literary  or  scien- 
tific man,  by  his  constant  appeals  to  public  approbation. 

Let  it  be  supposed  that  by  some  singular  chance  an  indi- 
vidual of  an  extraordinary  genius  is  born  among  a  tribe  of  low 
savages,  it  is  pretty  certain  that  he  would  not  be  a  great 
engineer,  nor  a  great  mathematician,  nor  a  great  moralist ; 
the  antecedent  elements  or  conditions  of  such  a  product  of 
civilisation  being  entirely  wanting  in  the  low  social  organi- 
sation, it  could  not  be  a  product  of  it ;  and  he  would  apply 
his  superior  powers  in  order  to  excel  in  those  arts  of  oratory 
in  council,  or  in  that  skill  and  valour  in  battle,  in  which  it 
was  the  tribal  ambition  and  the  tribal  glory  to  excel.  Nor 
would  the  moral  approbation  of  conscience,  individual  and 
tribal,  fail  to  be  measured  by  the  number  of  scalps  that  he 
brought  home.  Were  a  low  savage  transplanted  to  a  civil- 
ised country,  it  is  no  less  certain  that  he  would  fail  to  take 
root  there ;  though  he  might  be  well  constituted  after  his 
kind,  he  would  hardly  have  more  power  of  successful  adjust- 
ment to  the  complex  conditions  of  his  surroundings  than  a 
natural  imbecile  would  have ;  the  product  of  a  lower  and 
much  simpler  social  organisation,  he  has  neither  acquired  for 
himself  nor  inherited  from  his  ancestors  the  organic  involu- 
tion of  the  more  complex  social  conditions  which  would 
render  him  capable  of  feeling  them  and  of  adapting  himself 
to  them.  He  would  be  sadly  out  of  place  — without  hdbits,  and 
without  the  sensibilities  and  faculties  to  acquire  them.  The 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  would  not  sensibly  affect  a  native 
Andaman  islander,  nor  would  Kant's  categorical  moral  im- 
perative, in  spite  of  its  a  priori  chavsicter  and  innate  sanction, 
have  much  authority  in  the  conscience  of  an  Iroquois  Indian. 
We  may,  if  we  choose,  suppose  the  opposite  case  of  a  civil- 
ised youth  transplanted  into  the  midst  of  a  tribe  of  low 
savages  and  compelled  to  end  his  days  among  them,  without 
ever  having  intercourse  with  any  beings  higher  than  they : 
how  long  would  he  preserve  his  civilised  feelings  and  habits, 
with  nothing  in  his  surroundings  to  elicit  their  exercise,  to 
foster  their  growth,  to  maintain  their  vitality  ?  He  would 
dwindle  and  die  morall}--  and  intellectually,  as  a  gardener's 


MENTAL  EVOLUTION  AND   THE  SOCIAL  MEDIUM.         155 

slip  will  die  when  it  is  not  planted  in  a  suitable  soil  or 
grafted  in  a  suitable  structure,  though,  like  the  slip,  he 
would  grow  on  his  native  stem  or  if  planted  in  a  fitting 
medium. 

One  hardly  realises  for  the  most  part  to  what  singular 
fashions  of  thought  and  feeling  human  character  may  be 
bent  by  the  training  of  special  circumstances  and  habits : 
not  only  how  custom  dominates  in  belief  and  practice,  but 
how  it  operates  in  a  quasi-mechanical  way  to  determine  even 
modes  of  sensibility.  The  horror  felt  by  a  savage  at  the 
spectacle  of  a  human  sacrifice  is  less  than  that  which  would 
be  felt  by  a  civilised  person  who  was  not  a  butcher  at  the 
spectacle  of  the  slaughter  of  an  ox ;  and  I  dare  say  that  the 
children  of  the  village  would  dance  with  pleasure  and  imitate 
the  victim's  cries,  as  in  an  English  village  they  imitate  with 
delight  the  squeals  of  a  pig  that  is  being  killed.  Would  it 
have  been  believed  possible,  if  history  had  not  authenticated 
the  fact,  that  there  ever  were  nations  which  deemed  it  a 
mark  of  piety  and  affection  to  kill  and  eat  their  aged  fathers  ? 
See  how  the  ignorant  savage,  taken  prisoner  by  his  enemy, 
endures  the  menaces  and  tortures  to  which  he  is  subjected, 
without  uttering  a  single  sigh  or  cry  for  mercy,  or  making 
the  least  sign  of  submission;  with  what  an  invincible 
courage  he  braves  his  tormentors,  railing  at  them  and  defy- 
ing them  to  do  their  worst,  reproaching  them  with  their 
impotence  to  extract  one  cry  of  pain,  exulting  and  insulting 
over  them  in  boasts  of  the  greater  tortures  which  he  has 
made  their  people  suffer.  All  this  because  the  custom  of 
tribal  belief,  deeming  it  the  glory  of  a  death  by  torture  to 
triumph  in  such  stoical  endurance,  has  trained  his  nature 
into  such  a  development  as,  when  stimulated  to  an  ecstatic 
transport,  to  vanquish  its  natural  sensibilities. 

It  is  difficult  to  repel  an  intruding  suspicion  or  distrust  of 
the  stability  of  anything  based  in  human  progress,  when  one 
considers  the  grossly  inconsistent  belief  and  the  signal  moral 
insensibilities  in  particular  relations  that  exist,  sometimes 
without  the  least  reprobation,  and  even  without  a  perception 
of  their  inconsistent  character,  in  communities  and  individuals 
that  have  reached  a  high  state  of  general  intelligence  and 


156  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOaiCAL  ASPECT. 

moral  feeling.  So  impossible  is  it  to  say  of  any  qualities, 
however  incompatible,  that  they  may  not  coexist  in  the  same 
individual,  that  one  might  suppose  a  being  compounded  of 
entirely  opposite  qualities  and  believe  he  would  somehow 
contrive  to  reconcile  them.  Certainly  we  shall  find  a  man 
sometimes  to  be  one  person  in  one  set  of  circumstances,  and 
quite  another  person,  displaying  different  habits  of  thought, 
feeling  and  conduct,  in  another  set  of  circumstances;  it 
is  with  him  as  it  is  with  a  boy  when  he  is  at  school,  and 
when  he  is  home  for  the  holidays,  who,  without  knowing  it, 
falls  under  different  habits  of  thought  and  feeling  instantly 
the  change  is  made,  and  in  one  state  can  hardly  realise 
himself  thinking  and  feeling  as  he  does  in  the  other.  Eeflect 
on  the  gross  examples  among  all  nations  of  superstitious 
credulity  contradicting  the  earliest  and  most  constant  teach- 
ings of  daily  experience  and  the  plainest  dictates  of  morahty ; 
on  the  most  devilish  tortures  that  human  ingenuity  could 
devise  inflicted  by  devout  Christians  on  their  fellow-believers 
of  a  minutely  different  shade  of  faith ;  on  the  inculcation  of 
duelling  as  a  high  code  of  honour  in  the  same  breath  with  a 
devout  assent  to  the  commandment, '  Thou  shalt  not  kill ; '  on 
slaveholdingand  its  attendant  horrors  sanctioned  complacently 
by  pious  men  and  kind-hearted  fathers  of  families,  with- 
out the  least  suspicion  of  any  wrong  on  their  part ;  on  wars 
and  oppressions  undertaken  by  Christian  rulers  and  blessed 
by  the  ministers  of  a  gospel  of  peace  and  brotherly  love ; 
on  the  prayers  and  thanksgivings  to  Almighty  God  offered 
up  by  these  same  ministers  in  gratitude  for  triumphant 
slaughter;  on  hell  and  its  everlasting  torments  proclaimed 
the  eternal  portion  of  all  but  a  select  minority  of  the  human 
race,  and  by  them  contemplated  with  pious  equanimity,  if 
not  actually  as  a  reflex  augmentation,  by  contrast,  of  their 
unspeakable  felicity.*     Every  one  is  penetrated  and  intoned, 

■  Take  a  recent  example  furnished  by  one  of  the  best  known  popular 
preachers  of  the  day,  and  a  leading  light  among  the  Nonconformists.  In  a 
letter  to  the  hon.  sec.  of  a  branch  of  the  Antivivisection  Society,  he  says  : 
'  I  loathe  the  Bubject  intensely,  and  I  am  unable  to  imagine  the  process 
by  which  men  of  education,  or  men  at  all,  bring  themselves  to  perform  such 
cruelties.'  In  a  sermon  on  the  '  Kesurrection  of  the  Dead,'  an  approval  of 
the  torture  breeds  another  kind  of  eloquence.     '  When  thou  diest  thy  soul 


MENTAX  EVOLUTION  AND  THE  SOCIAL  MEDIUM.         157 

SO  to  speak,  bj  the  social  atmosphere  of  the  particular 
medium  in  which  he  lives,  and  in  the  end  so  assimilates  it, 
makes  it  so  essential  a  part  of  himself,  that  he  is  insensible 
to  moral  relations  that  are  not  embedded  in  it,  and  feels 
no  repugnance  to  immoral  procedures  which  it  sanctions. 
Fortunate  indeed  is  it  that  there  is  a  gradual  development 
of  the  social  organism  independent  of  the  foresight  and  the 
conscious  efforts  of  individuals,  a  stream  of  tendency  out- 
side their  premeditations  and  predeterminations;  that 
nourished  bj  a  silent  process  of  evolution  the  travailing 
organism  displays  the  deep  impulse  of  its  being  by  putting 
forth  of  its  own  motion,  at  the  proper  stage  of  its  growth, 
the  initial  germ  of  the  fitting  organ  to  carry  it  to  a  higher 
stage  of  evolution.  '  Know  thyself,*  says  the  moralist :  to 
do  that,  says  philosophy,  is  to  know  humanity,  past  and 
present,  working  in,  for,  and  by  thee. 

That  the  social  medium  has  been  created  for  man  by 
humanity,  as  the  blood  is  formed  by  the  tissues  for  the 
organism,  is  a  fact  which  we  cannot  keep  too  clearly  in  mind 
when  we  are  considering  its  character  and  influence.  As 
soon  as  he  enters  it,  he  finds  himself  surrounded  with  the 
fruits  of  the  long  travail  of  humanity  in  the  most  easily 
assimilable  forms :  a  language  that  embodies  its  social  evolu- 
tion ;  aU  the  various  appliances  of  the  arts  and  sciences  that 
have  been  tediously  acquired  in  the  succession  of  ages ; 
commerce  and  its  complicated  monetary  means  for  the  inter- 
change of  commodities;  the  surface  of  the  earth  as  it  has 
been  laboriously  adapted  to  his  uses  by  countless  generations 
of  mankind ;  human  beings  of  his  own  kind,  each  of  whom 
has  implicit  in  his  nature  the  experiences  of  the  race  from 
its  beginning,  and  so  appeals,  as  well  by  the  silent  eloquence 
of  look  and  gesture  as  by  the  articulate  word,  to  the  like 
implicit  contents  of  his  nature.     With  man  there  is  a  con- 

will  be  tormented  alone,  that  will  be  a  hell  for  it ;  but  at  the  Day  of  Judg- 
ment thy  body  will  join  thy  soul,  and  then  thou  wilt  have  twin  hells — thy  soul 
sweating  drops  of  blood,  and  thy  body  suffused  with  agony.  In  fire,  exactly 
like  that  which  we  have  on  earth,  thy  body  will  lie,  asbestos-like,  for  ever  un- 
consumed — all  thy  veins  roads  for  the  feet  of  pain  to  travel  on,  every  nerve  a 
string  on  which  the  devil  shall  for  ever  play  his  diabolical  tune  of  hell's 
unutterable  lament.' 


158  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT, 

tinuityy  with  animals  a  succession  only,  through  the  ages ; 
and  so  while  the  human  infant  inherits  the  gains  of  the 
race's  experience,  the  rhinoceros  has  profited  little  or  nothing 
by  the  experiences  of  its  race  for  the  last  three  thousand 
years.  In  order  to  have  a  scientific  conception  of  the  origin 
and  development  of  human  society,  however,  we  ought  to 
observe  the  simplest  social  facts  as  they  present  themselves 
in  nature,  and  to  reflect  upon  them  in  their  objective  aspects, 
not  as  they  present  themselves  in  the  light  of  the  subjective 
experience  of  a  high  social  development;  being  well  on 
guard  not  to  bias  observation,  or  to  prejudge  them  in  any 
way,  by  the  assumption  of  a  supernatural  inspiration  or 
other  mysterious  initial  principle.  Now  the  facts  are  that 
social  union  exists  in  creatures  far  below  man  in  the  scale  of 
animal  life — notably,  for  example,  in  the  bees  and  in  the 
ants.  The  ants  have  their  slaves,  their  workers,  their 
warriors,  their  milch-cows,  or  rather  milch-lice ;  their  store- 
houses of  winter  grain,  and,  as  some  observers  imagine,  their 
places  of  burial  and  their  planted  fields ;  their  disciplined 
industry,  their  methodical  wars,  their  admirable  inter-com- 
munications and  co-operations  in  difiiculties  and  dangers. 
Indeed,  we  might  well  ask,  as  Celsus  asked  long  ago,  'if  any 
one  looked  down  from  heaven  upon  earth,  what  difference 
would  he  perceive  between  the  works  of  men  and  those  of 
bees  ?  '  This  he  would  perceive,  that  neither  politician,  nor 
philosopher,  nor  human  labourer  of  any  sort,  be  he  the  busiest 
imaginable,  pursues  his  work  with  the  persevering  industry 
and  intense  singleness  of  purpose  displayed  by  one  of  these 
little  creatures ;  which,  moreover,  does  not  make  any  claim  on 
the  admiration  of  its  kind  while  it  is  doing  its  work,  nor  look 
for  any  memorial  of  itself  after  its  life-work  is  done.  In 
this  connection  let  this  pregnant  reflection  not  escape  notice 
— that  the  architectural  works  of  the  ant  and  the  bee,  like 
the  wonderful  webs  of  the  spider,  are  constructive  or  creative 
works,  no  less  so  than  a  lace  woven  or  than  a  palace  built 
by  human  hands  ;  they  are  as  truly  works  of  art  as  a  poem 
or  a  picture  ;  and  if  they  had  been  done  by  man,  we  should 
consider  them  the  products  of  a  creative  imagination,  and 
admire  them   as   excellent  works  of  that  noblest  faculty. 


MENTAL  EVOLUTION  AND  THE  SOCIAL  MEDIUM.         15S 

But  in  the  ant  they  are  not  works  of  imagination  in  the 
human  sense  of  the  term ;  they  are  the  work  of  organic 
matter  of  a  certain  complexity  of  nature  in  a  certain 
structural  form;  and  what  they  prove  is  that  an  organic 
body  by  itself,  without  help  of  mind,  is  capable,  in  its 
degree,  of  doing  that  for  which  we  think  it  necessary  in 
human  doings  to  invoke  the  conscious  function  of  mind.  In 
like  manner,  the  conclusion  we  ought  to  draw  from  the 
social  life  of  ants  and  bees  is  not  that  human  society,  con- 
sciously pre-ordained  or  divinely  inspired,  is  the  natural 
thing,  and  that  these  communities  of  ants  and  bees  are  an 
extraordinary  and  unaccountable  freak  of  nature  or  caprice 
of  Deity,  but  simply  that  there  has  been  a  natural  tendency 
to  the  formation  of  social  aggregations  by  organic  beings  of 
a  certain  complexity  under  certain  conditions  of  existence  ; 
that  the  disposition  to  co-operation  in  social  union  is  an  ulti- 
mate and  essential  fact  of  organic  development  of  certain 
kinds — just  as  much  so  as  any  complex  chemical  combination 
or  the  formation  of  a  complex  organic  molecule.  If  that  be 
so,  the  right  course  is  to  apprehend  the  fact  distinctly,  and 
to  use  it  in  our  examination  of  the  beginnings  of  human 
society,  not  to  apply  to  the  social  phenomena  of  ants  and 
bees  conceptions  derived  from  the  workings  of  man's  in- 
telligence in  the  events  of  his  social  state. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  human  beings  do  habitually  construct 
imaginatively,  without  consciously  pre-ordaining  what  they 
will  construct,  for  imagination  works  independently  of  con- 
sciousness and  will,  its  results  only  being  so  illumined ; 
indeed,  there  is  not  a  faculty  of  mind  which,  though  they 
began  by  using  it  consciously,  they  do  not,  after  habitual 
practice,  exercise  unconsciously.  By  continual  repetitions 
a  sensation  becomes  less  conscious,  till,  having  become  part 
of  our  habitual  relations,  it  is  hardly  sensation  at  all :  we  do 
not,  for  example,  ordinarily  feel  the  presence  of  an  artificial 
tooth  which  we  have  long  had,  nor  the  friction  of  the  clothes 
which  we  daily  wear.  But  the  impression  which  has  lost  its 
distinctly  conscious  character  as  a  sensation  has  then  become 
a  want  or  need,  so  that  the  absence  of  it  is  felt  as  the  dis- 
comfort of  something  wanting ;  it  has  been  so  incorporate 


160  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

in  our  nature  tliat  its  removal  leaves  a  sort  of  rent  or 
wound  in  our  mental  being.  In  like  manner,  custom  dulls 
perceptive  consciousness,  till  perception  becomes  almost  or 
quite  automatic;  we  practise  it  habitually  in  regard  to 
familiar  objects,  witbout  consciousness  of  what  we  are 
doing,  and  experience  the  greatest  difficulty  in  the  world  to 
go  outside  the  path  of  habit ;  wherefore  it  is  that,  bound  to 
the  tracks  of  habit,  we  fail  to  perceive  new  facts  that  lie 
close  at  hand,  and  miss  for  years  the  most  obvious  discoveries 
which  they  suggest.  In  these  habitual  perceptions  men  are 
scarcely  less  automatic  than  are  ants  and  bees  in  their  per- 
ceptions and  acts.  Desire  again,  intense  as  it  is  in  the  first 
instance,  becomes  automatic  by  habitual  repetition ;  whence 
it  notably  happens  that  the  end  desired  is  lost  sight  of  in 
the  means  adopted  to  attain  it,  that  which  was  means  coming 
to  be  desired  as  end  ;  and  afterwards,  when  prolonged  repe- 
tition has  made  this  pursuit  the  habit  of  a  life,  even  the 
consciousness  of  the  secondary  end  disappears,  being  trans- 
formed into  the  need  or  necessity  of  an  habitual  activity. 
Thus  we  see  man  brought,  in  all  the  relations  of  his 
habitual  mental  activity,  to  automatic  states  verj'-  like  those 
of  the  ants  and  bees,  and  find  it,  if  we  attempt  the  task, 
almost  as  difficult  a  business  to  move  him  out  of  them  as  it 
is  for  these  creatures  to  go  outside  the  range  of  their 
machine-like  doings :  the  moral  of  the  whole  matter  being 
that  most  men  eventually  are  little  more  than  machines, 
whose  sayings  and  doings  from  day  to  day  may  be  predicted 
with  as  much  certainty  as  the  cries  and  doings  of  a  parrot. 
Organisation  proves  itself  capable  of  doing  in  them  that 
which  it  does  by  itself  in  the  ant  or  bee. 

Perhaps  it  will  be  asked  how  it  is,  if  organisation  by 
itself  can  do  these  wonderful  things,  and  if  there  is  a  natural 
tendency  in  certain  kinds  of  organic  beings  to  form  social 
aggregations,  that  many  more  societies  like  those  of  bees 
and  ants  have  not  been  formed.  The  answer  is  that  it  was 
impossible  they  should  be  formed,  or,  if  formed,  should 
survive,  when  all  the  social  tendencies  of  organic  matter 
had  been  concentrated  in  man.  Once  he  had  formed  society, 
he  checked  by  his  dominating  ascendency  that  social  evolu- 


\ 


MENTAL  EVOLUTION  AND  THE  SOCLiL  MEDIUM. 

tion  in  otlier  directions  wliicli,  but  for  his  appearance  on 
earth,  might  have  gone  on  to  results  we  cannot  imagine, 
and  for  aught  we  know  may  be  going  on  now  in  some  other^ 
planet.  In  all  directions  the  lower  animals  found  themselves 
checked  and  pursued,  their  societies  disintegrated,  and  them- 
selves destroyed  by  the  higher  animal  who,  strong  in  social 
union,  modified  the  whole  surface  of  the  earth  to  his  uses, 
and  sacrificed  to  his  services,  to  his  clothing,  to  his  orna- 
ments, to  his  appetites,  to  his  destructive  propensities,  every 
kind  of  creature  over  which  he  had  been  given  dominion. 
Had  one  or  two  of  the  larger  species  of  animals,  such  as  the 
lion  and  the  elephant,  formed  societies,  like  bees,  it  might 
have  gone  hard  with  man's  dominion  and  even  his  existence 
on  earth.  Why  they  did  not,  and  why  bluebottles  have  not 
formed  societies,  like  bees,  are  questions  that  ambitious 
sociologists  might  perhaps  usefully  apply  themselves  to 
answer. 

Meanwhile,  we  may  suppose  that  the  societies  of  ants 
have  survived  as  lessons  of  what  might  have  taken  place 
in  other  animals  under  more  favourable  auspices,  and  that 
their  social  union  became  an  actuality  of  organic  deve- 
lopment, instead  of  being  arrested  as  a  possibility  only,  by 
reason  of  their  burrowing  habits  in  the  construction  of  their 
habitations,  of  the  smallness  of  their  ingeniously  constructed 
bodies,  of  their  tenacious  industry,  of  their  prolific  natures, 
of  their  numbers,  and  of  the  strength  of  their  social  union. 
And  if  we  take  leave  to  indulge  still  more  fanciful  notions, 
we  may  suppose  again  that  the  superiority  of  ants  over  bees 
in  social  evolution  is  owing  to  the  fact  that,  being  for  the 
most  part  without  wings,  and  so  constrained  to  a  closer  and 
more  sternly  earnest  converse  with  their  more  limited  and 
less  varied  surroundings,  they  acquired  a  serious,  patient, 
persevering,  and  diligent  character,  rather  than  a  light  and 
volatile  disposition ;  not  otherwise  than  as  the  inhabitants 
of  northern  and  temperate  climes,  forced  to  gain  their  means 
of  subsistence  and  comfort  by  stern  struggles  with  nature, 
and  so  to  develope  understanding  by  intending  their  minds 
to  its  laws,  have  been  made  more  earnest,  industrious, 
practical,  and  inventive  than  the  inhabitants   of  tropical 


162  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

regions,  wlaere  tlie  luxuriance  of  nature  favours  indolence 
and  frivolity.  The  advantage  of  wings  has  not  been  an 
intellectual  advantage  to  the  beings  that  possess  them. 

Whatever  its  cause,  the  existence  of  a  strong  social  sense 
in  ants  cannot  well  be  disputed.  Moreover,  they  have 
attained  to  a  pretty  complex  society  without,  so  far  as  we 
know,  the  events  that  have  been  necessary  to  bring  human 
beings  to  their  social  state — without  a  fall  from  happiness 
because  of  eating  a  forbidden  grain,  without  the  necessity  of 
an  atonement,  without  supernatural  intervention  of  any  sort. 
Have  they  perhaps  some  vague  religious  sentiment?  At 
the  first  blush  it  is  a  question  that  appears  grossly  absurd  ; 
and  yet  it  is  not  inconceivable  that  creatures  which  possess 
such  a  good  foundation  of  moral  sense  as  they  manifestly  do, 
have  some  dim  glimmei'ing  or  quivering  in  them  of  that 
which  passes  in  human  beings  as  religious  sentiment.  A 
vague  awe  they  may  have  of  a  vast  and  overwhelming  en- 
vironment which,  in  the  to  them  inapprehensible  form  of 
an  elephant's  foot  or  other  such  huge,  unknown,  irresistible 
body,  can  crush  them  into  instant  nothingness  ;  and  perhaps 
it  was  a  vague  awe  of  that  kind  which,  by  a  steady  repression 
of  the  egoistic  and  by  a  fostering  of  the  altruistic  element, 
served  to  constrain  them  into  social  union.  The  minutely 
and  marvellously  organised  matter  of  their  little  bodies 
might  display  a  sort  of  religious  instinct  without  a  religious 
consciousness,  as  it  displays  productive  imagination  without 
imagining,  and  social  feeling  without  consciousness  of 
citizenship ;  for  the  ant's  State  is  not,  any  more  than  the 
human  State,  founded  on  explicit  theory  and  held  together 
by  consciously  elaborated  principles. 


SECTION  V. 

THE    SOCIAL   FUSION    OF   EGOISMS. 

It  is  certainly  impossible  to  account  for  the  social  sense  in 
man,  in  the  sense  of  explaining  why  it  is  what  it  is :  we 
might  as  well  ask  why  sexual  sensibility  is  what  it  is,  or 
why  any  other  special  sense  is  special.  The  example  of 
the  ants  shows  us  that  we  need  not  look  for  its  origin  in 
the  deliberate  operations  of  a  pre-ordaining  conscious  in- 
telligence of  man,  or  in  any  special  divine  interposition 
on  his  behalf.  That  man  is  a  social  being  is  a  funda- 
mental, ultimate  fact  of  observation ;  we  perceive  it  in  the 
social  tendency  which  he  has  shown,  independently,  in 
different  parts  of  the  earth  in  all  ages ;  a  tendency  which 
has  forced  him  into  simple  social  union  in  the  first  instance, 
and  afterwards  in  succession  into  higher  and  more  complex 
unions,  against  his  strong  resistance  and  in  spite  of  his 
eflForts  to  remain  separate.  It  is  the  all-mightiness  of  the 
whole  dominating  the  particular  desires  and  wills  of  the 
part.  Nothing  is  more  remarkable  than  the  way  in  which 
he  has  been  made  social  in  spite  of  himself,  by  the  re- 
pression of  egoistic  passions  opposing  themselves  violently  to 
the  union  of  individuals,  of  tribal  egoisms  and  antipathies 
opposing  themselves  to  the  consolidation  of  tribes  into  a 
nation,  of  national  egoisms  and  antipathies  opposing  them- 
selves to  the  confederation  of  mankind.  By  blood  and  iron 
has  the  welding  work  been  done,  in  obedience  to  a  stronger 
impulse  than  human  passions  could  counteract. 

So  soon,  however,  as  men  had  united  to  form  a  society,  so 
soon  would  a  social  sense  inevitably  be  generated  ;  its  occur- 
rence in  the  circumstances  of  such  co-operation  is  a  simple 
and  ultimate  fact  of  nature.  A  society  without  social  feeling 
would  be  a  contradiction  in  essence.  This  reflection  we  may 
not  inaptly  make  here :  that  just  as  simpler  chemical  com- 
pounds are  combined  into  a  more  complex  compound,  losing 
by  such  combination  their  own  special  properties,  nay  rather 
having  these  suppressed  properties  constrained  to  minister 


164  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL   ASPECT. 

\o  its  maintenance  and  transformed  into  the  properties  which 
it  displays  ;  so  the  egoistic  passions  and  desires  of  the  indi- 
vidual are  combined  and  fused  and  utilised  in  the  social 
state  to  generate  the  common  life  and  to  minister  to  the 
common  weal  of  the  community,  losing  their  specific  qualities 
in  the  operations  by  which  their  social  transformation  is 
effected.  Egoism  comprises  the  sum  of  inclinations  that 
aim  at  purely  personal  gratification,  each  of  these  inclina- 
tions having  its  particular  gratification ;  and  the  further  we 
go  back  in  civilisation  the  greater  is  the  predominance 
which  these  egoistic  impulses  have.  If  we  could  conceive 
an  individual  isolated  and  entirely  alone  in  the  world  he 
would  be  a  perfect  egoist.  But  when  the  egoisms  of  two 
individuals  who  must  live  together  meet,  then  the  necessity 
to  bear  and  forbear  is  instantly  made  evident. 

Let  us  imagine  various  chemical  bodies  with  their  specific 
energies  to  be  brought  together  and  thereupon  immensely 
compressed  or  constrained  into  a  certain  material  mould  or 
form ;  it  is  obvious  that  unless  the  energies  entirely  paralyse 
one  another — which,  since  energy  is  indestructible,  cannot 
be — they  must  produce,  in  consequence  of  their  interactions 
of  afiinity  and  repulsion,  a  resulting  energy  that  is  not  in 
the  least  like  any  of  them.  So  likewise  is  it  with  the  social 
combinations  of  individual  egoistic  desires  and  energies. 
Their  antagonisms  entail  modifications  and  neutralisations 
in  the  forms  of  tolerances,  compromises,  forbearances,  do- 
as-you-would  be-done-by  obligations,  and  the  like ;  and  the 
union  of  suspended  antagonisms,  in  order  to  the  defensive  or 
offensive  action  of  the  two  persons  against  other  persons, 
generates  agreement  in  aim  and  means,  and  sympathy  of 
thought  and  feeling.  If  they  are  not  to  be  mutually  anni- 
hilatory,  individual  aggregates  of  egoistic  energies  must  so 
combine — first  into  families,  and  then  into  tribes ;  thereupon 
families  or  tribes  are  pressed  or  welded  into  larger  unions 
by  the  antagonisms  of  similar  complex  aggregates  in  hostile 
face  of  them  ;  and  so  it  comes  socially  to  pass  that  atoms 
unite  to  become  molecules,  as  it  were,  and  these  again  to 
become  more  complex  molecules,  by  the  concentrating 
pressure  of  surrounding  antagonisms  forcing  repulsions  into 


THE  SOCIAL  FUSION  OF  EGOISMS,  165 

affinities.  So  solves  itself  tlie  problem  how  out  of  seemingly 
irreconcileable  egoisms  to  make  altruism.  Abstract  virtue 
is  virtue  without  contents ;  the  contents  of  actual  virtue  are 
that  which  is  not  virtue ;  the  word  signifies  nothing  except 
bj  implication  of  its  opposite — vice.  For  that  reason  we 
rightly  do  not  call  God  virtuous.  Everywhere  we  see  the 
difference  of  the  properties  of  the  whole  from  the  properties 
of  the  organic  factors :  the  social  community  is  something 
more  than  a  juxtaposition  or  aggregation  of  individuals  ; 
the  State  quite  another  thing  than  an  aggregation  of  local 
communities ;  the  national  character  or  consciousness  some- 
thing different  from  the  aggregation  of  many  assemblies  of 
individuals  in  many  towns.  For  the  most  part  science  can 
tell  the  nature  and  number  of  the  elements  that  form  a 
complex  chemical  molecule  and  the  exact  proportions  in 
which  they  combine  ;  but  it  will  plainly  be  a  long,  long  time 
before  it  is  able  to  define  exactly  the  constituent  factors  of 
a  social  organisation,  and  to  set  forth  their  relations  to  one 
another  in  the  product. 

Meanwhile  it  is  obvious  enough  how  in  the  social  state 
the  egoistic  passions  of  men — their  antagonistic  rivalries, 
jealousies,  emulations,  ambitions,  avarices,  and  the  like, 
being  constrained  and  utilised  in  spite  of  themselves  to 
serve  the  common  good — are  really  the  conditions  of  social 
progress :  how,  for  example,  avarice  operates  usefully  to 
incite  commercial  zeal  and  activity,  self-interest  to  establish 
rights  of  property,  ambition  to  stir  men  to  political  and 
other  public  work,  envy  to  spur  them  to  make  themselves 
equal  to  the  object  of  envy,  vanity  to  inspire  them  so  to 
please  as  to  gain  the  approbation  of  their  fellows ;  so  that 
in  the  result,  as  Vico  remarked,  '  vices  capable  of  destroying 
the  human  race  produce  public  happiness.'  It  is  not  that 
private  vices  become  public  virtues,  as  Mandeville  ingeniously 
maintained,  but  it  is  that  the  neutralisations,  fusions  and 
other  complicated  reactions  of  these  personal  forces,  when 
brought  together  in  the  social  crucible,  are  constrained  to 
issue  in  results  contributive  to  the  welfare  of  the  whole. 

To  seek  private  good  in  the  fullest  gratification  of  his 
passions    the    individual    must    recognise    social    interde- 


166  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

pendences  and  adapt  his  conduct  to  the  conditions  in  which 
he  is  a  social  element.  Self-love  is  not  despicable,  but 
laudable,  since  duties  to  self,  if  self-perfecting — as  true 
duties  to  self  are — must  needs  be  duties  to  others.  Just  as 
he  may  gratify  a  particular  passion  that  is  strong  in  him  to 
the  injury  of  himself  as  a  whole,  in  defiance  of  what  a  large 
and  true  self-love  would  prescribe,  so  as  a  social  element  he 
may  gratify  his  egoistic  impulses  in  an  extreme  way  and  to 
the  hurt  of  society  as  a  whole.  But  just  as  he  cannot  get 
the  fullest  gratification,  counting  duration  as  well  as  in- 
tensity, out  of  a  particular  passion  except  by  subordinating 
it  to  the  larger  welfare  of  the  whole,  losing  in  the  end  if  he 
over-indulges  it ;  so  he  cannot  get  the  fullest  and  best  grati- 
fication of  all  his  egoistic  impulses  in  a  complex  society, 
except  through  a  restraining  respect  to  the  interests  of 
society  as  a  whole ;  he  gains  not,  but  loses,  in  the  end,  if  he 
gives  way  to  inconsiderate  excess.  As  member  of  a  social 
body  he  cannot  live  except  by  living  in  it,  by  it  and  for  it, 
any  more  than  an  organ  of  his  own  body  can  live  separate 
from  the  whole.  Indeed,  it  is  an  incontrovertible  truth  that 
if  a  man  were  deliberately  to  set  himself  by  careful  calcula- 
tion to  obtain  the  greatest  happiness  possible  for  himself  in 
this  world — which  he  could  do  only  by  getting  the  utmost 
gratification,  not  of  a  particular  appetite  or  passion,  but  of 
every  passion,  appetite,  sentiment  or  emotion  which  he  was 
capable  of  being  affected  by — the  experiment  would  in- 
fallibly force  him  to  a  vital  realisation  of  the  truth  that  he 
and  others  in  the  social  body  are  truly  members  of  one  body, 
in  which  no  one  can  suffer  or  rejoice  apart,  and,  as  such, 
fellow- workers  to  an  end  which,  though  not  pre-conceived 
by  them,  actually  controls  and  directs  their  energies.  He 
would  feel  vitally  the  solidarity  of  mankind,  and  perceive 
that  in  it  he  lives  and  has  his  being ;  by  it,  witting  or  un- 
witting, is  governed ;  and  from  it  derives  obligations  of  duty. 
For  it  is  not  merely  that  his  passions  work  in  spite  of  him 
to  a  higher  and  wider  end  than  he  foresees,  but,  inde- 
pendently of  reflection,  he  is  himself  insensibly  permeated 
and  inspired  with  the  social  spirit  in  which  he  is  born  and 
lives :    the  consequence  of  which  is  that  his   own  nature 


THE  SOCIAL  FUSION  OF  EGOISMS.  167 

undergoes  a  gradual  social  transformation  with  the  advance 
of  social  development,  and  so  the  desire  of  what  seems  to 
liim  good  becomes  little  by  little  less  self-regarding  and  has 
more  and  more  regard  to  the  good  of  the  community.  As 
a  socially  constituted  being,  he  does  social  acts  naturally 
and,  so  to  speak,  instinctively,  without  considering  exactly 
whether  they  will  bring  him  pleasure  or  pain  ;  he  feels  his 
own  weal  in  the  common  weal,  and  it  is  his  pleasure  to 
exercise  the  function  of  which  he  is  capable ;  in  fact  it  may 
come  to  be  his  egoistic  impulse  to  act  altruistically,  his 
selfish  impulse  to  act  unselfishly.  How  vain  and  empty 
then  the  vague  discussions  concerning  the  hedonistic  or 
altruistic  primum  mobile  of  individual  conduct ! 

It  is  very  evident  that  the  different  appetites,  passions, 
and  affections  of  individuals  in  social  combination  tend 
really  to  promote  both  public  and  private  good,  though 
some  of  them  have  more  immediate  respect  to  private, 
others  of  them  to  public  good.  The  sexual  passion  is  as 
strong  an  instance  as  can  be  adduced  of  a  purely  egoistic 
passion,  for  its  impulse  is  blind  self -gratification — in  its 
most  brutal  aspects,  a  veritable  rape  of  pleasure  ;  but  when 
we  reflect  on  its  wide-reaching  results  in  the  foundation  of 
the  family,  which  is  the  constituent  element  of  society,  we 
perceive  how  vast  a  social  signification  it  has.  It  is  not  by 
eradication  but  by  wise  direction  of  egoistic  passions,  not 
by  annihilation  but  by  utilisation  of  them,  that  progress  in 
social  culture  takes  place ;  and  one  can  only  wonder  at  the 
absurdly  unpractical  way  in  which  theologians  have  de- 
claimed against  them,  contemning  and  condemning  them, 
as  though  it  were  a  good  man's  first  duty  to  root  them  clean 
out  of  his  nature,  and  as  though  it  were  their  earnest  aim  to 
have  a  chastity  of  impotence,  a  morality  of  emasculation. 

What  wonder  that  Christian  morality  has  failed,  and  must 
fail,  to  govern  the  practical  conduct  of  life  in  the  struggle 
for  existence,  and  that  the  individual  perforce  accommodates 
his  morality  to  his  life,  instead  of  adjusting  his  life  strictly 
to  his  morality  !  Could  there  be  a  more  unhappy  spectacle 
than  that  of  the  poor  wretch  who  should  take  its  moral 
maxims  in  literal  earnest  and  make  them  the  strict  rules  of 


168  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

his  life  ?  The  plain  effects  of  them  are  to  make  beggars  and 
impostors  by  profusion  of  charity ;  to  invite  affronts  by  easy 
forgiveness  of  injuries ;  to  render  it  the  interest  of  no  one 
either  to  befriend  or  to  forbear  injuring  another,  because  of 
its  rigid  inculcation  of  the  same  loving  attitude  towards 
friend  and  enemy ;  to  put  the  innocence  of  the  dove  at  the 
mercy  of  the  guile  of  the  serpent ;  to  make  the  good  man 
the  easy  prey  of  the  scoundrel ;  to  suffer  crime  to  go  un- 
punished because  it  must  always  be  that  there  is  no  one 
who  has  the  sinless  right  to  punish  ;  to  cultivate  sorrow  and 
self-abasement  as  the  creed  of  life  ;  to  take  no  thought  for 
tomorrow,  because  the  lilies  of  the  field  toil  not ;  in  fine,  to 
do  all  those  things  that  would  render  a  State  impossible. 
An  eminent  Catholic  writer  has  surmised  that  men  would 
have  falsified  geometry  as  they  have  corrupted  Christianity, 
had  it  been  their  interest  to  do  so ;  but  the  truth  is  that 
the  corrupted  Christianity  is  an  example  of  the  survival  of 
the  fittest,  a  proof  of  the  necessity  of  the  corruption  ;  and 
that  Christianity  could  not  have  survived  at  all  had  it  not 
been  corrupted  into  practicality.  The  grand  and  lofty  ideal 
which  it  presents  goes  far  to  leave  human  nature  out  of  the 
reckoning ;  and  therefore  human  nature,  when  it  ought  to 
reduce  it  to  practice,  goes  far  to  leave  it  out  of  the  reckoning. 
And  as  in  time  past,  so  in  time  to  come ;  for  it  is  not  likely 
that  men  will  ever  be  brought  to  a  sheep-like  uniformity  of 
character,  when  they  shall  be  gentle,  peaceable,  free  from 
disturbing  desires  of  progress,  having  all,  wanting  nothing, 
happy  in  a  placid  immobility  of  being.  Such  an  extinction 
of  originality  in  what  would  be  evolutional  closure  will 
always  be  prevented  by  the  feverish  activity  of  the  un- 
quenchable passions  of  human  nature,  for  it  is  by  them  that 
nature  pursues  its  aim,  in  spite  of  man's  ideal  desire  of 
peace,  concord,  ease ;  they  are  the  ministers  of  its  work,  and 
through  them  he  is  made  to  fulfil  its  purpose.  All  the 
horrible  and  heartrending  things  that  have  ever  been  in  the 
world — wars,  slaughters,  tyrannies,  tortures ;  frauds,  guile, 
intrigues  and  lies ;  lusts,  rapes,  revelries,  debaucheries, 
thefts,  murders  and  other  crimes  ; — all  the  offsprings,  great 
and  small,  open  or  secret,  immediate  or  remote,  of  human 


THE  SOCIAL  FUSION   OF  EGOISMS.  It) 9 

passions  have  been  strictly  necessary  events  in  the  becoming 
of  what  is — not  to  be  deplored  as  accidents,  but  viewed  in 
tranquil  spirit  as  fulfilments,  of  progress  —  and  will  continue 
to  be  necessary  events  thereof,  so  long  as  the  order  of  pro- 
gress continues  to  be  human.  Not,  perhaps,  always  in  the 
gross  and  violent  manifestations  of  the  pa.st :  wars,  for 
example,  may  cease  in  their  crude  military  forms  of  open 
violence,  but  they  will  still  continue  in  subtler  forms  of 
commercial  and  industrial  competitions ;  and  the  passions 
which  they  breed  in  these  circumstances  may  perhaps  be 
more  insidious  and  demoralising  than  those  of  open  war, 
which,  as  an  incomparable  school  of  heroism,  devotion, 
self-sacrifice,  has  actually  been  the  mightiest  instrument  of 
huma,n  progress.* 

Co-operation  to  a  common  end  has  been  at  the  foundation 
of  all  society,  and  it  is  easy  to  perceive  how  it  may  have 
been  a  main  basis  of  the  formation  of  language,  which  is  so 
essentially  bound  up  with  social  development.  For  my  part, 
I  hold  that  the  working  of  men  together  for  a  definite  pur- 
pose has  preceded  their  feeling  together;  that  synergy  goes 
before  sympathy  ;  and  that  the  latter  is  developed  as  a  con- 
sequence of  the  former.  The  order  of  the  process  in  fact  is 
— first,  synergy,  then  sympathy,  and  afterwards  synthesis — 
that  is  to  say,  in  their  order,  action  together,  feeling  together, 
and  thinking  together.  The  consensus  of  action  becomes  a 
sense-in-common  or  social  sense,  and  the  latter  by  a  still 
higher  evolution  a  coiiscience  or  moral  sense,  which  is  the 
affective  outcome  of  Jcnowing  or  thinking  together,  the  feeling 
bred  of  a  common  intellectual  synthesis.  Always  is  it  the  effect 
of  co-operative  activity  to  engender  a  common  feeling  as  the 

•  Open  robbery  by  violence  on  the  highway  is  pretty  well  extinct,  and  we 
pride  ourselves  on  our  progress  in  consequence.  But  was  that  open  robbery  of 
the  person  really  so  immoral  and  so  widely  harmful  as  the  more  subtle  and 
far-reaching  robbery  of  those  who  start  fraudulent  commercial  companies  and 
ruin  thousands  ?  And  was  the  moral  state  of  the  community  worse  then,  when 
the  highwayman  was  hanged  for  his  crime,  than  it  is  now  when  the  successful 
company-monger  who  lives  by  robbery  is  not  hanged,  not  even  scouted  as  a 
scoundrel,  but  is  received  into  society  because  of  his  riches,  and  becomes  per- 
haps a  member  of  the  legislature,  where  it  would  be  thought  very  ill  manners 
to  make  the  least  reference  to  his  criminal  career  ? 
12 


170  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

expression  of  it;  and  as  intellectual  activity  represents 
complex  reflex  processes  of  activity  at  successively  higher 
removes,  the  corresponding  feelings  are  respectively  also  of  a 
higher  and  more  refined  character ;  whence  it  comes  to  pass 
that  conscience  or  moral  sense  rises  higher  and  higher,  in  its 
different  degrees  of  refinement,  by  development  out  of  social 
feeling.  But  to  say  so  is  not,  as  some  persons  hastily  and 
indignantly  imagine,  to  say  that  moral  sense  is  no  more 
than  a  primitive  social  sense  :  the  parts  of  a  flower  are 
transformed  leaves,  but  the  flower  is  not  a  leaf,  nor  is  it 
identified  with  a  leaf  by  having  its  parts  traced  back  to  a 
primitive  leaf.  In  like  manner,  to  trace  the  roots  of  the 
moral  sense  down  into  social  feeling,  and  even  deeper  still  into 
the  instinct  of  propagation,  as  one  might  do,  is  not  an  identi- 
fication of  two  things  that  are  different,  but  an  exposition  of 
a  particular  case  of  continuity  of  development  in  nature. 

The  recognition  of  an  inflexible  order  of  nature  does 
not  strip  phenomena  of  their  moral  meaning,  as  many 
persons  ignorantly  fear;  on  the  contrary,  the  growth  of 
morality  through  the  ages,  which  they  are  happy  to  believe 
takes  place,  is  only  possible,  outside  metaphysical  regions, 
by  virtue  of  such  order.  Is  there  any  good  reason  why  the 
doctrine  of  evolution  and  the  doctrine  of  epigenesis  should  be 
opposed  to  one  another  as  irreconcileable  doctrines  ?  More 
correctly  perhaps,  epigenesis  is  an  event  of  evolution,  and 
evolution  impossible  without  epigenesis  ;  for  evolution, 
strictly  speaking,  is  the  unfolding  of  that  which  lies  as  a 
preformation  in  germ,  which  a  new  product  with  new 
properties  manifestly  does  not,  any  more  than  the  differen- 
tial calculus  lies  in  a  primeval  atom ;  while  epigenesis 
signifies  a  state  that  is  the  basis  of,  and  the  causative  impulse 
to,  a  new  and  more  complex  state.  There  is  a  leap ;  and  it 
is  not  good  philosophy  to  blindfold  ourselves  with  a  big  word 
when  taking  the  leap,  as  some  evolutionists  will  have  us  do, 
and  then  to  protest  that  we  have  not  taken  it.  At  the  same 
time  it  is  equally  bad  philosophy,  on  the  other  side,  to 
ignore  the  continuity  between  the  new  and  old,  and  to  find 
a  reason  for  the  present  anywhere  else  than  in  the  basis  and 
impulse  of  the  past. 


THE  SOCIAL  FUSION   OF  EGOISMS.  171 

Given  beings  each  of  whom  is  moved  individually  by  an 
instinct  of  self-preservation  and  its  congenial  passions,  how 
to  obtain  a  social  and  altruistic  feeling  ?  The  answer  is,  by 
the  same  process  that  we  see  in  daily  operation  to  increase 
it  now  in  an  individual — namely,  by  the  social  transforma- 
tion of  egoistic  impulses.  Without  carbon,  hydrogen, 
oxygen,  and  nitrogen  there  could  be  no  organic  molecule ; 
without  the  animals  that  preceded  him  on  earth  in  the  line 
of  ascent  to  him  man  could  not  have  been,  for  he,  as  animal, 
sums  up  in  himself  the  characters  of  the  different  species  of 
animals  below  him  and  might  therefore  be  described  as  the 
collective  or  general  animal ;  without  the  egoistic  passions 
there  could  be  no  social  sense.  Perhaps  it  is  because  the 
moral  sense  has  been  developed  out  of  the  egoistic  passions 
that  it  is  capable  of  controlling  them,  for  such  control  will 
be  a  development  of  energy  at  their  expense  by  absorbing 
and  transforming  their  energies.  There  is  no  loss  of  energy, 
no  creation  of  energy,  only  a  conversion  thereof ;  what  con- 
science gains  passion  loses ;  and  how  could  conscience 
restrain  or  otherwise  affect  passion,  any  more  than  it  can 
restrain  or  otherwise  affect  gravitation,  if  it  had  no  affinity 
of  nature  with  it?  An  organic  molecule  could  not  maintain 
and  increase  itself  hy  taking  atoms  of  carbon  and  nitrogen 
into  its  structure,  were  not  atoms  of  carbon  and  nitrogen 
natural  constituents  of  its  structure.  The  aim  of  moral 
development  is  to  increase  the  higher  quality  which  has 
been  obtained  by  the  social  transformation  of  the  lower 
qualities ;  and  that  can  be  done  only  at  the  cost  and  by  the 
consumption,  as  it  were,  of  the  lower  qualities — by  the  social 
fusion  of  egoisms.  In  the  strength  of  a  man's  egoistic 
passions  lie  the  promise  and  the  guarantee  of  the  strength 
of  his  moral  nature,  if  so  be  he  succeeds  in  coercing  them 
into  entire  furtherance  of  its  best  development.  It  is  a 
huge  absurdity  then  to  place  the  egoistic  and  the  altruistic 
feelings  over  against  one  another  in  absolute  opposition  and 
contrast,  as  if  they  were  contradictory  and  entirely  unrelated 
qualities,  engaged  in  an  eternal  internecine  conflict,  and 
separated  by  the  impassable  barrier  of  a  different  order  of 
existence;    widely   as    they   appear    to    contrast    in   their 


172  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

functions,  altruistic  feeling  rests  at  bottom  on  the  basis  of  an 
equilibrium  of  the  passions.  It  may  well  be  that  the  mode 
of  evolution  of  moral  feeling  out  of  social  feeling,  and  of  social 
feeling  out  of  egoistic  feeling,  are  not  easily  discerned  in  the 
individual,  whose  consolidated  heritages  of  aptitudes  and  facul- 
ties prevent  us  from  tracing  things  back  to  their  beginnings 
and  so  giving  a  genetic  exposition  of  them,  but  an  examination 
of  the  development  of  the  race  will  leave  no  doubt  of  it. 

It  is  not  within  my  purpose  to  meddle  with  the  disputes 
concerning  the  nature  and  development  of  the  moral  sense, 
except  so  far  as  to  point  out  how  empty  and  unreal  they  are 
apt  for  the  most  part  to  be,  owing  to  the  common  habit  of 
abstracting  it  from  all  its  contents.  Instead  of  dilating  on 
an  inborn  moral  sentiment  or  intuition  of  right  and  wrong 
in  the  individual,  would  it  not  be  wiser  to  observe  accurately 
and  to  consider  well  moral  instances  as  they  are  actually 
presented  to  us  in  nature  ?  What  moral  feeling,  and  of  what 
kind,  is  there  in  children,  in  savages,  and  in  an  animal  like  the 
dog?  And  would  children  without  education  and  without  a 
suitable  intellectual  and  moral  medium  develop  it,  any  more 
than  they  would  develop  language  under  similar  unpropitious 
conditions  of  existence  ?  In  the  nervous  substrata  that 
represent  the  results  of  ancestral  action  in  moral  relations 
they  possess  the  proper  instruments  so  to  speak,  which  may 
be  trained  to  action,  but  which  will  not  act  without  fit 
training;  the  actual  process  of  events  being  not  inaptly 
comparable  perhaps  with  that  which  takes  place  in  the  train- 
ing of  the  eye-muscles  for  the  exceeding  fine  and  complex 
movements  of  educated  vision.  If  that  be  so,  the  intuition 
of  an  abstract  right  and  wrong  before  experience  is  as  much 
an  absurdity  as  the  innate  perception  of  a  cathedral,  or  as 
the  intuition  of  a  complete  European  moral  code.  But 
immediately  that  the  proper  stimuli  bring  them  into  action 
there  will  be  a  certain  pleasure  from  the  moral  exercise,  as 
there  is  from  the  exercise  of  other  functions;  and  that 
pleasure  is  naturally  fell  as  moral  sentiment. 

It  is  not  in  all  children  that  these  substrata  exist  in 
equal  perfection  of  development :  a  savage  child  could  no 
more  learn  high  morality  in  favourable  circumstances  than 


THE  SOCIAL  FUSION   OF  EGOISMS.  173 

it  could  learn  high  geometry;  and  amongst  children  of 
civilised  persons  there  are  great  differences,  some  being 
born  with  manifestly  better  moral  aptitudes  than  others, 
just  as  some  are  born  with  good  geometrical  aptitudes  and 
others  not.  From  the  moment  they  are  put  into  exercise 
in  a  civilised  child  they  are  subject  to  continual  training, 
conscious  or  unconscious,  through  imitation  and  education ; 
for  always  around  it  and  pressing  on  it  are  those  strong 
social  forces  which  are  connoted  by  such  names  as  sym- 
jpathy,  most  powerful  and  far-reaching  in  its  most  signal 
example  of  love;  imitation  which,  resting  on  a  basis  of 
sympathy,  is  a  function  of  the  nervous  system  that  we  see 
in  continual  operation,  conscious  and  unconscious ;  custom, 
the  power  of  which  to  determine  modes  of  thinking  and 
feeling,  as  well  as  doing,  it  is  impossible  to  exaggerate; 
and  opinion,  operating  not  only  well  in  inspii'ing  individuals 
with  the  desire  to  obtain  the  good  opinion  of  those  who  are 
rightly  respected  and  esteemed  by  them,  but  oftentimes  ill 
in  inculcating  bad  habits  of  thought  and  feeling,  and  giving 
an  authoritative  sanction  to  false  and  pernicious  beliefs. 
These  forces  act  so  steadily  and  continually  through  gene- 
rations that  they  might  well  end  by  making  all  men  alike, 
as  uniform  in  look  and  dispositions  as  a  flock  of  sheep,  were 
it  not  that  the  ever  active  passions  of  human  nature — envies, 
emulations,  ambitions,  and  the  like — prevent  such  a  peaceful 
consummation.  Necessarily,  however,  the  effects  of  special 
social  media  are  to  fashion  special  types  of  social  or  moral 
feeling,  according  to  the  particular  types  that  prevail  in  them 
respectively ;  wherefore  a  history  of  morals  is  the  story  of  a 
great  many  types  that  have  been  among  different  peoples  and 
at  different  epochs,  and  eternal  principles  have  not  had  a  longer 
eternity  than  the  space  of  an  epoch  or  the  life  of  a  nation. 

What  we  have  to  learn  from  these  considerations  is,  once 
more,  that  there  is  no  such  reality  as  an  abstract  moral  feel- 
ing or  conscience ;  that  conscience  is  not  being  but  notion ; 
that  there  are  as  many  particular  moral  feelings  as  there  are 
particular  cases  ;  a  great  variety  of  them,  differing  in  quality 
in  different  persons  and  in  different  peoples  according  to 
their  intellectual  and  social  developments  and  to  the  moral 


174  WILL  IN   ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

ideals  whicli  they  cherish  and  preach.  Morality  therefore 
may  contain  a  very  weak  or  a  very  strong  tincture  of  moral 
essence ;  and  it  is  with  the  particular  feeling  not  with  the 
abstraction  that  discussion  must  concern  itself  in  order  to  be 
fruitful.  To  this  end  it  should  not  be  lost  sight  of  for  a 
moment  that  morality  is  prach'caZ — its  basis  conformity  to  an 
end  outside  self,  the  end  of  the  whole  as  distinguished  from 
a  purely  personal  end ;  and  in  that  particular  aspect  what  we 
have  to  investigate  and  consider  are  the  special  and  complex 
functions  of  the  adapted  nervous  substrata  in  response  to  the 
special  and  complex  social  impressions.  A  grand  ethical 
principle  is  a  blaze  of  light  in  the  sky  far  overhead,  but  it 
does  not  lighten  the  particular  path  along  which  we  have  to 
painfully  pick  our  way;  for  it  is  the  application  of  the  prin- 
ciple to  the  special  case  that  is  the  trouble.  Not  to  think 
and  feel  only,  but  to  do,  is  the  end  of  being — to  act  oner's 
part  in  the  becoming  of  things  and  to  affect  for  good  or  ill  the 
common  weal  by  such  action ;  were  pure  contemplation  the 
business  of  life,  were  it  enough  to  think  and  feel  about  things, 
the  logical  end  of  it  would  be  a  self-annihilating  ecstasy. 

Here,  then,  with  the  highest  moral  feeling,  as  was  the 
case  with  abstract  thought,  we  are  brought  to  a  living 
contact  with  realities ;  home  we  come  in  the  end  to  the  pri- 
mitive basis  of  a  concrete  reflex  act,  if  we  are  resolved  to  un- 
derstand its  exact  meaning  or  contents.  To  dispute  about 
pains  and  pleasures  in  the  general,  egoism  and  altruism  in 
the  abstract,  as  motives  of  action,  is  to  begin  anywhere  and 
end  anywhere,  but  to  arrive  nowhere.  Pure  internal  feelings 
of  pleasure  and  pain,  of  moral  approbation  and  disapproba- 
tion, undoubtedly  exist,  but  in  the  order  of  existence  they  are 
rooted  in  action  and  developed  out  of  experience,  and  must 
in  the  last  resort  receive  their  interpretation  there.  In  the 
first  instance,  external  considerations  of  good  or  ill  determine 
suitable  and  useful  acts,  and  perhaps  the  very  same  kind  of 
acts  that  the  highest  moral  feeling  would  determine ;  at  a 
later  and  higher  stage  of  development,  the  feeling  which  has 
been  developed  out  of  action  exists  independently  of  the  ex- 
ternal considerations  that  were  effective  in  the  first  instance; 
and  then  the  feeling  by  itself,  which  is  purely  internal,  deter- 


Xw-e^, 


THE  SOCIAL  FUSION  OF  EGOISMS.  175 

mines  action,  its  pains  and  pleasures  therein  being  actually- 
greater  than  those  which  sprang  from  purely  intellectual  con- 
siderations of  self-interest.  But  if  we  would  test  the  ralue  of 
the  feeling  we  must  always  look  to  the  social  quality  of  the 
action ;  for  there  is  not  a  vice  nor  crime  of  which  human 
nature  is  capable  that  has  not  received  the  strongest  appro- 
bation of  conscience  in  one  nation  or  another,  at  one  period 
or  another  of  human  history. 


SECTION  YI. 

THE  COERCING  FORCES  OP  SOCIAL  UNION. 

To  coerce  the  egoistic  impulses  into  the  combination  or 
fusion  necessary  to  produce  the  most  primitive  social  feeling, 
it  is  plain  that  tremendous  pressure  from  without  must  have 
been  exerted  upon  the  individual  through  the  medium ;  for 
only  by  such  compression  of  their  energies  could  the 
conditions  of  transformation,  the  white  heat  of  fusion,  so  to 
speak,  be  generated.  We  may  compare  the  operation  to 
that  by  which  the  formless  and  sooty  matter  of  carbon  has 
been  converted  into  the  pure  and  sparkling  crystal  of  the 
diamond.  At  a  very  early  period  of  his  martyrdom  on  earth, 
the  conflict  with  the  powers  of  nature  and  the  animals 
around  him  must  have  forced  man  into  some  sort  of  co-opera- 
tion in  order  to  survive — to  conquer  by  obedience  and  to 
increase  by  conquest ;  and  it  is  plain  that  those  individuals 
who  did  unite,  and  more  especially  those  who  united  into 
the  more  compact  organisation,  having  therein  great  ad- 
vantages in  the  struggle  for  existence  over  those  who  did 
not,  would  survive  by  natural  selection. 

Mai'k  well  now  the  tremendous  agencies  that  were  invented 
in  the  shape  of  supernatural  powers,  social  rites,  sacred 
customs,  superstitious  ordinances,  and  the  like — oftentimes 
horribly  cruel  and  oppressive — and  used  in  the  most  unsparing 
way  in  order  to  enforce  conformity.  The  heavens  above  and 
the   earth  beneath  and  the  regions  under  the  earth  were 


176  WILL  IN   ITS   PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

peopled  with,  terrors  of  the  most  awful  kind,  with,  the  aim 

and  effect  of  compelling  obedience  and  establishing  a  com- 

pulsory  co-operation :  such,  the  terrible  syntheses  made  in 

order  to  enforce  synergy.     We  observe  a  similar  process  in 

operation  now  in  the  social  fears  and  pressures  brought  to 

bear  upon  classes  of  men  for  the  purpose  of  making  them  act 

yj     together— in  trade-unionism,  Irish  land-leagueism,  and  the 

i\2.   li^^*     ^s  there  any  tyranny  anywhere  equal  to  that  which  a 

\  J   savage  ruler  exercises  upon  his  subjects,  with  abject  submis- 

"Xj  sion  on  their  part,  in  enforcing  the  sacred  '  customs  '  of  the 

tribe  ?     What  would  be  the  fate  in  Dahomey  now,  or  in  any 

similar  barbarous  country,  of  a  reformer  who  should  venture 

to  call  in  question  the  bloody  and  barbarous  *  customs '  of  the 

nation  ?     But  indeed  it  is  almost  as  hard  to  conceive  the 

occurrence  of  that  sceptical  disposition  of  mind  in  such  a 

social  medium,  as  it  is  to  conceive  the  occurrence  of  an  ant  or 

other  insect  that  should  suddenly  go  outside  its  instincts  and 

adopt  a  useful  modification   of  conduct  which,  though  it 

misses  it,  seems  so  close  at  hand  and  palpably  evident  to  our 

higher  contemplative  intelligence  ;  or  to  suppose  a  complex 

reflex  act  that  subserves  a  particular  function  to  modify  its 

character  suddenly  in  order  to  supersede  its  old  by  a  new 

and  better  suited  function ;  or  to  imagine  a  narrow,  intense, 

evangelical  mind  that  had  never  by  any  chance  gone  outside 

the  shibboleth  of   the  particular  creed  and  phraseology  in 

which  it  was  born  and  bred,  to  develope  suddenly  extreme 

cosmopolitarian  notions  of  human  salvation  and  damnation ; 

or  to  conceive  ninety- nine  persons  out  of  a  hundred  getting 

out  of  their  habitual  routine  of  thought,  feeling,  and  conduct 

into  a  new  path  of  higher  thought  which  runs  close  at  hand. 

/  See   how  well   the   automatic  and   necessary  nature  of 

)(       habitual  lines  of  thought  and   reasoning  is  shown  by  the 

'      fact    that    calculation     and     reasoning    can    be    done    by 

/     machinery,    and    that    calculating    and    logical    machines 

"^"actually   approach    nearer  in   function  to  human  thought 

than   any   animal   can,  superior   as   the   animal   is   in  the 

\.       possession  of  feeling  and  will.     The  custom  of  the  tribe  is  a 

^     sufficient  explanation  to  the  savage  of  any  ceremonial  or 

observance,  however  oppressive,  and  he  cannot  conceive  that 

any  other  reason  for  it  should  be  necessary ;  it  is  that  which 


THE  COERCrsa.  FOECES  OF  SOCIAL  UNTON.  1 77 

always  has  been,  and  lie  cannot  conceive  it  as  not  being. 
In   like   manner,  tbe    automatism   of   a  particular  mental         \ 
^  ^    function  which  he  calls  a  belief  is  the  sufficient  justification  J 

of  it,  its  sure  guarantee,  to  the  person  who  has  never  brought 
his  mind  into  other  relations  of  experience  :  he  will  undergo 
martyrdom  for  conscience's  sake  rather  than  suffer  himself 
to  be  made  conscious  of  possible  error.  To  have  another 
belief  not  consistent  with  it  presented  to  him,  though  it  be 
one  for  which  another  person  would  undergo  martyrdom 
for  his  conscience's  sake,  occasions  him  much  the  same 
shock  of  horror  and  dismay  as  would  the  appearance  for  the 
first  time  in  a  tribe  of  savages  of  a  stranger  who  did  not 
conform  to  their  customs;  or  as  would  the  intrusion  into  a 
nest  of  ants  of  a  strange  ant  which  exhibited  other  instincts 
than  theirs.  In  both  cases  we  may  be  pretty  sure  that  the 
offended  community,  so  soon  as  they  rallied  from  the  shock 
of  surprise,  would  make  short  work  of  the  intruder  and  his 
novelties. 

For  an  individual  to  be  cast  out  of  his  special  society,  to 
be  excommunicated  from  his  community,  has  always  been 
regarded  as  a  terrible  punishment  by  those  who  inflicted 
it,  and  an  awful  fate  by  him  whom  it  befell ;  for  a  long  time, 
\.J    indeed,  it  was  equivalent  to  putting  him  out  of  all  human       \j 
y      society,  and  to  the  condemnation  of  him  to  a  lingering  death.       /^ 
^  \     So  great,  too,  was  the  imaginative  horror  of  ib,  apart  from      ' 
_  the  physical  sufferings  which  it  entailed,  that  he  might  well 
have  thought  it  a  less  terrible  thing  to  be  put  to  death 
by  his  tribe  than  to  be  put  out  of  it.      One  sees  in  the 
(     y  histories  of  savages  how  any  marked  deviation  from  bodily   N/ 
/^    uniformity — a  deformity  or  other  infirmity — which,  rendering 
^         the  individual  much  different  from  others,  put  him  out  of 

social  uniformity,  was  a  sufficient  reason  for  abandoning  or  \/ 
^/  destroying  him ;  and  one  sees  the  persistence,  until  quite 
^^  lately,  of  a  similar  feeling  with  regard  to  lunatics  in  civilised 
countries,  whose  treatment  in  consequence  was  extremely 
barbarous  and  cruel ;  for  it  was  long  after  infirmities  of  body 
had  ceased  to  excite  aught  but  compassion  that  infirmities 
of  mind  continued  to  excite  derision.  Indeed,  they  do  so 
still  in  some  measure ;  for  the  term  lunatic  provokes  laughter 


178  WILL   IN  ITS   PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

Whenever  it  is  uttered  in  tlie  senate  or  on  the  stage,  and  the 
malady  is  commonly  concealed  as  a  shame  by  the  family  in 
which  it  occurs.  Note  again  in  this  connection  the  tendency 
which  savages  and  children  show  to  laugh  and  jeer  at  bodily 
deformities,  at  the  infliction  of  sufferings,  and  the  like. 
Laughter,  if  we  consider  the  meaning  of  it,  is  essentially  a 
social  feature,  and  no  one  likes  to  be  put  out  of  society,  as  it 
were,  by  being  laughed  at,  even  though  he  may  have  small 
respect  for  those  who  laugh  at  him.  It  is  the  instinctive 
fear  of  social  extinction  that  constitutes  half  the  agony  of 
dying :  the  one  anxiety  that  a  dying  person  shows,  when 
lie  shows  any,  is  to  be  not  left  alone,  but  to  have  friendly 
faces  around  him ;  for  he  feels  vaguely  that  he  is  slipping 
away  from  his  social  surroundings  and  his  hold  on  being, 
jranishing  into  the  void  and  unknown,  and  he  desires  the  re- 
assurance and  stay  of  the  familiar  presence  of  friend  or  rela- 
tive to  cling  to,  as  the  supports  of  life  sink  under  him. 
Hence  also  it  is  that  he  commonly  finds  huge  comfort 
in  the  attendance  and  services  of  those  who  are  brought 
about  him  to  administer  spiritual  consolations  and  to  per- 
form the  last  ofiices  of  religion;  they  are  the  means  of 
making  for  him  a  special  and  fitting  social  support,  and  of 
so  helping  him  in  the  passage  from  the  social  environment 
that  is  slipping  from  his  failing  grasp,  to  another  environ- 
ment dimly  anticipated  but  looming  mysterious  and  unde- 
fined ;  and  he  leans  with  eagerness  on  the  support  at  that 
juncture  when  life  has  so  far  waned  in  him  as  to  occasion  a 
tremulous  forefeeling  of  its  early  extinction,  but  not  yet  so 
far  as  to  blunt  his  apprehensions  or  to  render  him  indifferent 
or  unconscious. 

The  creeds,  superstitions,  customs,  ceremonials,  laws, 
deities,  demons,  and  the  like,  by  which  the  social  compres- 
sion and  transformation  of  egoism  have  been  effected,  were 
not  of  course  invented  by  the  individual ;  but  certainly 
humanity  invented  them.  Out  of  itself  has  it  developed 
them,  under  the  pressure  of  its  environment,  as  the  fitting 
agencies  to  determine  its  progress  in  the  direction  which 
that  progress  has  taken.  They  were  rude  syntheses  framed 
to  give  it  some  unity  of  action  in  its  unequal  conflict  with 


THE   COERCING  FOECES   OF  SOCIAL  UNION.  179 

the  vast  and    unknown  powers  of   nature  which  it  found 
itself  face  to  face  with.     Rude  as  thej  were,  they  have  done 
their  work  in  the  guidance  of  conduct,  and,  having  done  it, 
they  have  faded  away  in  the  light  of  the  progress  which 
they  have  helped  to  make ;  until  now,  when  the  knowledge 
of  nature  by  civilised  peoples  has  become  so  wide  and  search- 
ing as  to  leave  them  no  nook  to  lurk  in,  we  are  left  with  the 
categorical  imperative  of  the  moral  law  as  sole  and  supreme 
sanction.     The  progress  has  been  from  the  graven  image  to 
what  we  may  call  the  graven-image-idea  of  a  personal  God 
y^  made  after  the  fashion  of  man  and  issuing  his  code  of  com- 
^  J    mandments  to  him,  and  from  that  again  to  the  abstract  con- 
yv    ception  of  a  moral  imperative.     In  its  imperative  rule  which, 
r        whether   innate    in   the    individual   or   not,   humanity  has 
created,  we  see  man  once  more  make  for  himself  the  neces- 
sity which  it  is  his  freedom  to  obey. 

In  noting  the  successive  steps  of  a  process  of  evolution 
in  nature  that  does  not  stop  short  at  man,  but  continues  on- 
^_wards  through  his  thinkings  and  doings,  our  proper  office  is 
to  observe  the  successive  facts  and  to  trace  the  order  of  the 
becoming;  we  cannot  in  the  least  explain  why  the  becoming 
should  be  as  it  is.  How  indeed  is  it  conceivable  that  we, 
parts  of  the  process,  beings  of  an  hour,  atomic  units  of  an 
/__  incomprehensible  whole,  could  ever  explain  that  which 
\  reaches  from  an  infinite  past  and  presses  forward  to  an  in- 
finite future,  and  of  the  pulse  of  which  any  attempted  expla- 
nation  is  but  a  moment?  We  are  not  bound,  however,  by 
this  admission  to  conclude,  as  some  do,  that  no  step  of  the 
process  coidd  have  been  better  than  it  was ;  that  all  organs 
and  organisms  are  most  perfect  in  their  kind,  and  could  not 
in  any  respect  have  conceivably  been  more  fit  for  their  pur- 
poses than  they  are ;  and  that  all  the  horrors,  crimes,  out- 
rages, sins,  and  sufferings  of  human  doings  from  the 
beginning,  being  necessary  steps,  were  the  best  possible 
events  of  a  best  possible  process  of  human  evolution.  It 
were  as  legitimate  to  admit  that  every  tree  of  a  kind  is 
perfect,  which  it  manifestly  is  not,  though  as  good  as  it 
could  be  in  the  chances  and  circumstances  of  its  position ; 
or  that  the  twisted  horn  of  a  ram  which  sometimes  grows 


180  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

steadily  througli  its  eye  into  its  brain,  blinding  it  first  and  in 
tbe  end  killing  it,  unless  tlie  shepherd  come  to  the  rescue,  is 
a  very  perfect  thing  of  its  kind.  There  are  few  creatures  in 
which  it  would  not  be  easy  for  a  competent  anatomist  to 
suggest  some  improvements  of  construction  to  enable  them 
to  fulfil  better  the  purposes  they  do  fulfil ;  and  certainly  it 
is  not  impossible  to  conceive  that  the  human  kind  might 
have  reached  its  present  plane  of  development  without 
some  of  the  waste  of  life  and  agony  that  has  been  so  marked 
a  feature  of  the  blood-stained  course.^  Considering  the 
manifold  gradations  and  modifications  and  degenerations  of 
organic  development,  and  the  tedious  transformations  through 
which  in  the  successions  of  the  ages  each  organ  and 
organism  has  reached  its  present  form,  it  would  appear  that 
nature  itself  was  profoundly  dissatisfied  with  its  work  before 
it  was  able,  by  attaining  to  consciousness  in  its  stage  of 
human  evolution,  to  know  that  it  was  so;  for  instead  of  pro- 
nouncing a  thing  good  of  its  kind  after  having  produced  it, 
its  habit  has  been  to  set  to  work  immediately  to  modify  it 
into  another  kind,  and  not  always  for  the  better.  The  inter- 
mediate gradations  which  geological  researches  make  known 
between  the  various  groups  of  organic  beings  that  now 
stand  apart,  what  were  they  but  so  many  transitional  steps  in 
construction  abandoned  soon  after  they  were  made,  as  if 
they  had  been  proofs  or  essays  ?  And  the  same  may  be  said 
of  the  successive  races  of  men  that,  like  leaves  on  trees, 
have  come  and  gone  through  the  measureless  past. 

The  facts  of  organic  and  human  nature,  when  observed 
frankly  and  judged  without  bias,  do  not  warrant  the  argument 
of  a  supreme  and  beneficent  artificer  working  after  methods 
of  human  intelligence,  but  perfect  in  all  his  works ;  rather 
would  they  warrant,  if  viewed  from  the  human  standpoint, 
the  conception  of  an  almighty  malignant  power  that  was 
working  out  some  far  off  end  of  its  own,  with  the  serenest 

'  To  speak  of  a  course  as  blood-stained  seems  from  the  human  standpoint 
to  convey  something  of  a  reproach.  But  from  the  standpoint  of  the  whole 
the  flow  of  blood  may  be  as  natural,  as  little  repulsive,  as  the  flow  of  water. 
Blood  is  instinctively  revolting  to  man,  because  it  is  associated  with  the 
destruction  of  individuality,  on  which  he  naturally  sets  mighty  store. 


THE  COERCING  FOECES  OF  SOCIAL  UNION.  181 

disregard  of  the  suffering,  expenditure,  and  waste  whicli 
were  entailed  in  the  process.  Is  it  impious  and  unlawful 
for  the  feeble  and  imperfect  understanding  of  a  finite 
creature  to  presume  to  measure  the  perfection  of  the  works 
of  an  incomprehensible  and  infinite  Being,  whose  ways  are 
past  finding  out,  and  in  whose  sight  the  highest  human 
wisdom  is  foolishness?  Be  it  so;  but  let  it  not  then  be 
overlooked  that  the  argument  for  the  existence  of  such  a^ 
supreme  artificer,  drawn  from  a  contemplation  of  his  won- 
derful works  or  from  any  other  revelation  of  him  in  human 
consciousness,  is  itself  essentially  and  entirely  anthropomor- 
phic ;  that  is  to  say,  it  is  the  transplantation  into  external 
nature  of  human  notions  of  working  to  an  end  on  certain 
lines  which  man,  from  his  finite  basis,  agrees  to  think  in- 
telligent, but  which  may  after  all  be  very  stupid.  If  we 
cannot  from  the  basis  of  our  own  capacities  justly  make  the 
smaller  inference  of  imperfect  workmanship,  what  right 
have  we  from  the  same  defective  basis  to  make  the  larger 
inference  of  a  conscious  personal  worker  conceived  in  the 
image  of  ourselves  and  acting,  like  us,  to  accomplish  ends 
which  he,  all-perfect  Being,  desires?  For  what  does  the 
theory  postulate  ?  The  Omnipotent  and  All-perfect  in  a  state 
of  desire  and  of  accomplishment ! 

Speculations  of  this  sort,  however,  are  really  void  of  any 
meaning.  Ideas  derived  from  conditional  existence  cannot 
apply  to  that  which  by  the  very  nature  of  the  case  transcends 
the  conditions  of  origin  of  the  ideas.  No  human  thought 
can  extend  itself  beyond  the  relative;  necessary  truths  are 
truths  that  are  necessary  within  human  experience ;  absolute 
truths  are  truths  that  are  absolutely  true  within  the  limits 
of  human  relations ;  the  categorical  imperative  is  the  impera- 
tive which  rules  within  the  category  of  human  being ;  they 
are  all  modes  of  finite  thought  and  feeling,  and  no  less  rela- 
tive than  are  sounds  or  smells.  No  straining  of  metaphy- 
_sical  speculation  will  ever  get  us  beyond  ourselves — ever 
make  the  contents  more  than  the  continent,  the  grasp  bigger 
"than  the  hand.  Infinite  is  a  merely  negative  word,  it  is  the 
negation  of  bounds,  woi-finite  ;  and  it  j^s  really;  to  dupe  our- 
selves with  a  vain  imagination  to  make  it  something  positive 


182  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

by  naming  it  the  infinite,  and  to  use  it  thereafter  as  thougli 
it  were  the  something.  To  us,  measuring  things  by  human 
intelligence,  the  seemingly  prodigal  waste  of  material,  the 
multitudes  of  germs  and  seeds  that  perish  timelessly,  the 
numberless  abortive  failures  of  function  and  development, 
the  slow  and  bungling  methods  of  work ;  a  whole  creation 
groaning  and  travailing  through  countless  ages  of  pain  and 
death  in  order  at  the  end  to  issue  in  such  a  being  as  pri- 
meval man ;  then,  after  his  coming,  countless  ages  more  of 
human  savagerj'^  and  infinite  waste  of  life,  marked  by  suflE'er- 
ings  so  great  that  it  might  fairl}--  be  questioned  whether  all 
those  that  had  gone  before  would  fill  up  their  measure ;  until 
at  length  the  time  was  come — not  yet  two  thousand  years 
ago — for  the  appearance  of  the  Saviour  who  was  to  make 
atonement  for  the  sin  of  which  these  were  the  consequences, 
and  to  proclaim  for  the  first  time  the  right  law  of  life ;— all 
this  must  needs  appear  wasteful  and  bad  workmanship. 
Have  all  these  things  been  exactly  necessary  to  produce  a  being 
who,  for  the  first  time,  could  suffer  the  pain  of  knowing  and 
feeling  them,  and  who  then  might  make  the  self-crucifixion 
of  the  divine  element  in  him  the  initiation  of  a  higher  pro- 
gress ?  Given  infinite  power,  however,  and  infinite  time,  and 
infinite  material,  what  right  have  we  to  speak  of  the  trans- 
cendent business  in  terms  of  our  notions  ?  Quicken  percep- 
tion so  that  a  thousand  years  is  as  the  twinkling  of  an  eye 
to  it,  and  what  becomes  of  the  waste  and  bungling ;  retard 
it  so  that  a  moment  is  as  a  thousand  3'ears,  and  what  waste 
and  bungling  might  we  not  think  to  find  in  the  now  imper- 
ceptibly rapid  stroke  of  a  gnat's  wing  ?  Yiew  from  a  proper 
distance  a  cataract  of  water  tumblinof  headlonsr  from  a  moun- 
tain  height,  it  appears  a  solid  and  motionless  mass,  '  frozen 
by  distance:'  imagine  oneself  inside  a  molecule  of  seemingly 
inert  matter,  with  senses  fine  and  acute  enough  to  perceive 
what  goes  on  there,  the  complicated  motions  and  harmonies 
of  the  solar  system  might  seem  simple  by  comparison  with 
its  intestine  motions.  Under  different  conditions  of  percep- 
tion the  most  nice,  quick  and  exact  adaptation  of  means  to 
end  which  we  know  in  nature  might  appear  to  be  the  very 
play  of  chance,  and  the  success  of  it  a  mere  accident. 


THE  COERCING  FORCES  OF  SOCIAL  UNION.  183 

While  perceiving  a  process  of  organic  evolution  going 
steadily  on,  howbeit  in  what  appears  to  us  a  very  v^asteful 
fashion,  we  ought  not  to  overlook  the  fact  that  side  by  side 
with  it  everywhere  there  is,  as  Lamarck  did  not  fail  to  point 
out,  a  process  of  degeneracy.  All  the  changes  that  take 
place  are  not  ascending  steps  of  evolution,  some  of  them  are 
descending  steps  of  degeneration;  not  all  of  them  events  of 
a  becoming,  many  of  them  events  of  an  unbecoming;  not  all 
of  them  the  products  of  doing,  many  of  them  the  products  of 
an  undoing ;  organisms  undergoing  degenerative  modifica- 
tions that  render  them  less  fit  for  their  purposes,  and  retro- 
grade organic  products  being  formed  that  act  to  produce  dis- 
solution. There  is,  so  to  speak,  a  broad  and  easy  way  lead- 
ing to  degeneration,  decay  and  death,  which  is  the  opposite 
of  the  steep  and  narrow  path  that  leads  to  evolution  and 
fuller  life.  The  principle  of  good  and  the  principle  of  evil 
in  the  world,  which  have  been  recognised  by  all  peoples  in 
all  ages  under  one  form  or  another  by  way  of  explanations 
of  positive  facts  of  observation,  may  be  taken  to  be  primitive 
intuitions  of  these  opposite  laws  of  evolution  and  degeneracy. 
Nay,  one  may  perhaps  venture  to  go  further  and  say  that 
the  theory  of  a  fall  fj-om  a  state  of  perfection  and  happiness, 
whereby  sin  and  suffering  gained  entrance  into  the  world, 
was  a  one-sided  generalisation  from  facts,  made  instinctively 
to  account  for  phenomena  which  are  the  outcome  of  the  law 
of  degeneracy  in  nature.  Having  made  this  generalisation, 
it  became  necessary,  first,  to  account  for  such  a  downward 
tendency,  and  afterwards  to  reconcile  with  it  the  evidence 
of  an  opposite  progressive  tendency,  which  also  could  not 
escape  observation:  hence  two  theories — the  theory  of  an 
expulsion  from  bliss  in  consequence  of  disobedience  inspired 
by  the  evil  principle,  whereby  things  went  wrong ;  and  the 
complementary  theory  of  an  atonement  for  the  sin  by  the 
good  principle,  whereby  things  became  capable  of  amendment 
and  mended.  At  present  we  fix  attention  too  much  perhaps 
on  the  process  of  evolution,  to  the  overlooking  of  the  corre- 
lative process  of  degeneration  that  is  going  on,  not  only 
in  low  but  in  high  organisms ;  not  only  in  the  low  but  in  the 
high  functions  of  the  higher  organisms;  not  only  in  body 


184  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

but  in  mind ;  not  only  in  cliaracters  but  in  beliefs ;  not  only 
in  individuals  but  in  societies ;  not  only  in  societies  but  in 
nations. 

That  the  supreme  artificer  produces  tbese  degenerations 
and  all  the  sufferings,  sharp  and  lingering,  which  the 
working  out  of  them  in  so  wide  and  various  domains  of 
nature  means,  or  permits  them  for  his  own  wise  and  inscru- 
table purposes — a  wisdom  safely  predicated  that  in  the  same 
breath  is  declared  to  be  inscrutable — is  a  satisfactory  theory 
to  the  theologian,  who  acknowledges  that  there  cannot  be 
*evil  in  the  city  and  the  Lord  hath  not  done  it,'  and  a  theory 
which  has  been  the  most  powerful  of  all  agencies  in  promot- 
ing the  social  evolution  of  mankind ;  but  it  will  not  equally 
satisfy  always  those  who  fail  to  see  sufficient  reason  why 
man  should  put  a  magnified  personality  of  his  own  fashion 
and  fashioning  into  and  over  nature,  making  it  co-extensive 
with  infinity  of  time  and  space  :  a  being  of  anthropomorphic 
construction  who  from  a  human  basis  is  yet  built  up  of  the 
negations  of  all  positive  human  conceptions,  being  wfinite, 
^}^,comprehensible,  ineffable,  invisible,  inscrutable,  inconceiv- 
able, incorporeal,  immortal.  The  sum  of  a  multitude  of 
negations  making  one,  and  that  The  One  ! 


SECTION  YII. 

CERTAIN   MENTAL    PEODUCTS    OF   EVOLUTION. 

I  PEOCEED  now  to  examine  the  nisus  of  evolution  in  its 
highest  expressions  in  the  great  organism  of  humanity,  pur- 
posing to  find  in  it  the  foundation  and  inspiration  of  certain 
feelings,  aspirations,  and  beliefs  which,  being  widely  spread 
amongst  mankind  and  not  easy  to  account  for,  have  been 
thought  to  be  intuitions  of  supernatural  origin.  The  fact  is 
notable  that  men  have  often  believed  that  they  possessed 
another  and  higher  source  of  knowledge  than  the  senses, 
whether  called  supernatural  inspiration,  mystical  intuition, 
divine  reminiscence,  or  by  whatever   other  name  5  even  so 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  185 

decided  an  advocate  of  the  transformation  of  sensation  into 
knowledge  as  Condillac  allowed  that  they  did  possess  supra- 
sensual  intuition  when  they  were  in  the  garden  of  Eden, 
maintaining  only  that  they  lost  it  on  the  occasion  of  their 
expulsion  therefrom,  JSTow  whence  have  sprung  the  notions 
of  a  past  golden  age  when  all  was  peace  and  happiness,  and 
of  a  life  to  come  after  death  when  sorrow  and  death  shall  be 
no  more?  Whence  that  fair  fable  of  the  morning  and  that 
fond  vision  of  the  evening?  Was  it  perhaps  that  the 
pageant  of  radiant  glory  in  the  heavens  which  oftentimes 
heralds  the  rising,  and  follows  in  the  train  of  the  setting 
sun,  was  applied  by  a  natural  transference  to  the  rising  and 
setting  of  human  life?  If  the  different  refractions  of  the 
vibrations  of  light  by  intervening  vapours  were  the  true  cause 
of  the  glorious  myth,  as  of  the  glorious  spectacle,  well  may 
Kant  be  said  to  have  drunk  confusion  to  Newton  who,  by  the 
discovery  of  the  spectrum,  had  destroyed  the  poetry  of  the 
rainbow.  However  that  be,  the  belief  of  a  future  state  of 
^  immortality  is  so  widespread  and  firmly  fixed,  so  instinc- 
7\  tively  urgent  apparently,  that  the  existence  of  it  is  often  ad- 
duced as  an  irrefutable  argument  of  its  truth.  Is  it  then 
actually  a  prophetic  forefeeling  which  mankind  has  had 
more  or  less  dimly  from  the  beginning  and  will  have  more 
and  more  clearly  to  the  end;  or  is  it  the  survival  of  an 
ancient  superstition  that  is  gradually  undergoing  extinction, 
with  no  higher  authority  for  its  alleged  universality  than  its 
natural  prevalence  as  a  belief  proper  to  a  certain  immature 
stage  of  the  development  of  human  thought?  For  it  is 
certainly  true  of  beliefs,  as  of  organisms,  that  they  sur- 
vive in  the  world  in  retrograde  or  degenerate  states  for  a 
long  time  after  changes  in  the  medium  have  rendered 
their  former  functions  obsolete  and  them  unfit  to  perforai 
them. 

Whence  again  do  men  obtain  their  eager  aspirations 
\/  after  a  higher  ideal  of  understanding,  feeling,  and  conduct 
than  earth  has  ever  known?  Here  is  a  human  ideal,  an 
ideal  made  by  nature  through  man,  which,  however,  nature 
has  never  realised,  and  is  always  as  far  as  ever  from  realis- 
ing, because  as  practice  improves  the  ideal  rises  in  propor- 
13 


186  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

tion.    Moreover,  tjhe  ideal,  in  order  to  be  realised,  must  liave 
its  ideal  social  conditions,  which  it  is  impossible  it  should 
ever  have ;  for  it  is  the  initial  variation  of  a  higher  develop- 
ment, which  has  to  adapt  itself  in  the  best  way  it  can,  that 
is,  with  the  least  prejudice  to  its  own  higher  nature,  to  ex- 
isting social  conditions,  and  in  so  doing  to  improve  them. 
No  little  ridicule   has   at   different   times   been  thrown  on 
Lamarck's  notion  that  it  is  the  want  or  need  which  creates 
the  organ  by  minute  increments  of  growth,  and  it  is  a  notion 
which  easily  lends  itself  to  ridicule ;  but  what  have  we  in 
the  ideal  but  a  sense  of  want  in  the  highest  mental  organ- 
isation,  a   yearning   or   striving   to   satisfy   itself    and   an 
impulse  to  development  in  consequence  ?     Why  may  not  the 
impulse  that  manifests  itself  in  consciousness  as  a  want  be 
displayed  essentially  by  developing   organic   matter,  albeit 
without   consciousness?     What   Lamarck   may   be   said  to 
/    have  done  was  to  describe  the  nisus  in  terms  of  conscious- 
V/     ness  instead  of  discovering  the  organic  nisus  beneath  the 
"^       conscious  want.     Be  that  as  it  may,  however,  it  is  plainly 
necessary  for  mankind  to  have  its  ideal,  if  it  is  to  make 
progress ;  when  it  has  lost  the  imagination  of  a  state  of  per- 
fection which  never  is  but  always  is  to  be,  it  will  have  lost 
the  impulse  of  evolution  and  have  entered  on  the  path  of  its 
decline.     Does  not  instinct,  if  we  consider  it  well,  signify  a 
y    desire  or  want  of  something  which  is  not  actually  appre- 
)t     hended,  a  dumb  craving  for  the  unknown  ?     The  analysis  of 
'^    will,  when  we  make  it,  brings  us  to  desire  enlightened  and 
guided  by  reason,  that  is,  to  the  want  of  a  known  and  ap- 
proved object;  but  if  we  carry  the  analysis  deeper  down  from 
complex  desire  to  the  most  simple  desire  and  thence  to  ap- 
petite, we  come  at  last  to  the  question — Why  a  desire  or 
appetite  for  something  before  that  which  is  desired  is  known  ? 
'   "      Consciousness  does  not  make  the  desire ;  it  is  that  which  lies 
^^'  beneath  consciousness  in  the  desire  that  stirs  the  conscious- 
ness, the   unconscious    appetite  that   makes   the  conscious 
desire.     We  must  plant  ourselves  at  the  last  on  the  funda- 
mental property  of  life  to  maintain  and  increase  itself,  and 
we  then  find  ourselves  resting  on  the  eternal  nisus  of  evolu- 
tion.    So  that  by  this  way  of  proceeding  we  perceive  again 


X 


CERTAIN   MENTAL  PRODUCTS   OF  EVOLUTION.  187 

that  our  highest  mental  aspirations  to  the  ideal  are  truly 
the  highest  evolutional  manifestations  as  thej  take  place  in 
human  consciousness.  It  is  curious  to  note  bj  the  way  here 
how  man's  two  fundamental  instincts,  the  self-conservative 
and  the  propagative,  may  be  discovered  at  the  foundations 
respectively  of  the  two  great  doctrines  of  materialism  and 
idealism  ;  the  former,  coarse  and  common,  so  to  speak,  having 
immediate  respect  to  the  present,  and  the  latter,  more  refined 
and  glowing  with  the  glamour  of  love,  having  a  large 
respect  to  the  future. 

Whence  the  categorical  imperative  of  the  moral  sense  ? 
Whence  the  instinctive  feeling  of  a  self -determining  will, 
in  defiance  of  all  arguments  demonstrating  its  inclusion 
within  the  law  of  conservation  of  energy- — a  feeling  that 
inspires  the  conviction  of  something  different  from  any  other 
sort  of  determination  within  human  experience  and  sub- 
stantially warrants  the  persistence  of  the  disputes  concerniog 
freedom  ?  We  are  to  inquire  now  whether  the  answers  to 
these  questions,  so  far  as  they  can  be  answered,  are  not  to 
be  sought  in  the  fathomable  operations  of  the  unfathom- 
able impulse  of  evolution ;  of  which  it  may  truly  be  said  that 
it  Cometh  from  afar,  was  before  man  was,  works  in  his 
progress,  prophesies  in  his  instincts  and  aspirations,  inspires 
his  faiths,  is  interpreted  lamely  in  his  creeds,  and  its  end  is 
not  yet. 

The  doctrine  of  evolution  substitutes  a  continuous 
creation  for  a  creation  by  separate  shocks,  and  thereby 
nowise  lessens  the  mystery  of  the  universe.  To  say  that 
nature  produces  an  organ  or  a  species,  or  that  it  is  produced 
by  evolution,  or  that  it  comes  by  a  process  of  becoming,  is 
to  say  exactly  the  same  thing  in  different  words ;  there  is 
not  a  jot  more  light  in  one  statement,  as  a  general  state- 
ment, than  in  another.  Certainly  there  is  not  creation  in 
the  sense  of  the  making  of  something  out  of  nothing  ;  no 
addition  takes  place  to  the  whole  sum  of  matter  and  energy 
in  the  universe  ;  the  new  thing  which  is  the  product  of  the 
old,  but  not  the  old,  having  its  own  properties  or  functions, 
is  obtained  by  the  transformation  of  lower  kinds  of  force 
and  matter,  and  is  capable  of  equivalent  resolution  into  them 


188  WILL  IN   ITS   PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

again.*  A  new  organism  is  the  product  of  precedent 
organisms  and  of  the  external  conditions  of  the  medium, 
but  it  is  neither  the  precedent  organism  nor  the  external 
conditions;  nor  is  it  merely  the  arithmetical  sum  or  me- 
chanical compound  of  them ;  it  is  a  new  product  with 
properties  of  its  own,  distinctly  autonomous.  But  to  endow 
it  with  autonomy  of  function  is  not  to  ascribe  to  it  spontaneity 
either  of  being  or  function ;  it  has  not  been  built  up  out  of 
the  void,  nor  does  it  live  but  in  relation  to  a  medium  ;  and 
always  an  external  stimulus,  direct  or  indirect,  is  required 
to  act  upon  the  stored  energies  of  its  structures,  and  so  to 
liberate  what  seem  at  first  sight  remote  and  disproportionate 
effects. 

Let  this  conception  be  applied  to  the  highest  functions 
of  the  most  complex  nervous  organisation  as  they  are 
manifest  in  the  operations  of  mind ;  and  in  particular  to 
that  purposive  determination  of  energy  that  follows  de- 
liberation— namely,  to  will.  Motives  are  necessary  antece- 
dents of  will,  but  assuredly  will  is  not  motive,  nor  is  it 
simply  the  sum  of  the  foregoing  motives ;  it  is  a  new 
product,  the  outcome  of  antecedents  certainly,  but  autono- 
mous. Here  then  may  be  the  ground  of  a  sort  of  recon- 
ciliation between  those  who  advocate  freewill  and  those  who 
advocate  determinism.  On  the  one  hand  is  the  absolute 
certitude  that  will  is  not  the  mechanical  consequence  nor 
the  arithmetical  sum  of  the  antecedent  motives,  that  it 
possesses  and  exhibits  more  than  can  be  discerned  in  them ; 
on  the  other  hand  is  the  equal  certitude  that  motives,  secret 
and  open,  near  and  remote,  explicit  in  consciousness  and 
incorporate  in  faculty,  always  do  go  before  an  act  of  will 
and  are  pre-essential  to  it.  On  either  side  there  is  a  grasp 
of  that  part  of  the  truth  which  is  overlooked  by  the  other 

'  Is  the  intellect  of  a  Shakspeare  or  a  Newton  capable  then  of  being  ac- 
counted for  by  any  transformation  of  natural  forces,  or  of  being  resolved  into 
any  imaginable  equivalence  of  forces  ?  Those  who  put  such  a  question  with 
scorn  as  one  that  is  utterly  ridiculous,  should  first  inquire  and  explain  why  a 
Shakspeare  or  Newton  could  not  possibly  appear  among  a  tribe  of  savages, 
and  why,  if  the  impossible  events  did  take  place,  the  productions  of  their 
mighty  intellects  would  be  nil.  After  that  exposition  the  discussion  might 
begin. 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  189 

side :  may  not  the  two  sides  then  unite  in  the  conclusion 
that  precedent  motives  are  necessary  constituents  of  will, 
but  that  the  qualities  of  the  product  are  special,  its  functions 
autonomous  ?  It  needs  no  disquisition  to  make  it  probable, 
after  what  has  gone  before,  that  this  autonomy  of  will, 
which  we  recognise  as  a  scientific  conclusion,  according  to 
the  apprehension  of  sense  and  in  conformity  with  our  ex- 
perience of  other  natural  phenomena,  will  declare  itself  to 
the  internal  apprehension  of  consciousness  as  a  strong  senti- 
ment of  freewill :  that  whi5h  is  autonomy  objectively  will  be 
self-determination  subjectively.  There  is  not  an  inde- 
pendence of  every  influence,  but  a  more  or  less  exclusive  de- 
pendence on  internal  influences. 

When  we  perceive  in  a  department  of  natural  laws  the 
appearance  of  a  phenomenon  that  is  not  governed  by  those 
laws,  but  witnesses  to  the  intervention  of  laws  from  another 
and  higher  domain  of  nature,  it  is  not  sound  philosophy  to 
seek  for  the  source  of  these  in  spiritual  abstractions  or  in 
supernatural  inspirations ;  our  duty  is  to  ascend  into  the 
higher  and  unknown  domain,  and  to  study  its  natural  laws 
by  the  same  methods  which  we  have  used  successfully  in  the 
lower  domains  where  we  have  made  ourselves  at  home.  The 
intrusions  from  on  high  should  not  be  wondered  at  as  super- 
natural, but  studied  as  the  events  of  a  higher  natural 
domain.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  not  sound  science  to 
apply  the  known  laws  of  the  phenomena  of  the  lower 
domain  to  an  entire  explanation  of  the  phenomena  of  the 
higher  domain;  still  less  to  beguile  oneself  into  the  belief 
of  an  explanation  by  the  vague  misapplication  of  the  special 
terms  of  the  former,  which  have  definite  meanings  in  their 
proper  use  and  place,  to  the  more  complex  phenomena  of 
the  latter,  where  they  not  only  do  not  cover  and  fit  the  facts, 
but  have  their  own  exact  significations  blurred  and  de- 
faced by  the  misuse.  In  the  knowledge  of  organic  functions, 
how  full  soever  it  may  be,  we  shall  not  find  the  adequate 
explanation  of  social  phenomena.  Physiology  analyses  and 
decomposes  and  recomposes  man  as  an  organic  being  into  a 
variety  of  structures  and  a  multitude  of  reactions,  and  dis- 
plays their  relations  in  the  organic  whole ;  but  it  is  sociology 


190  WILL  m  ITS   PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

■wliich  must  then  take  up  the  tale  and  investigate  his  functions 
as  a  man  amongst  men  united  in  a  society,  discerning  and 
displaying  his  nature  and  functions  as  a  social  and  moral 
being.  The  social  organism  is  not  a  mere  physiological 
organism  ;  it  is  that  and  a  great  deal  more,  being  essentially 
of  historical  significance,  and  requiring,  in  order  to  be  under- 
stood, the  study  of  antecedent  social  states ;  and  it  will 
demand  in  the  end  a  new  and  more  complex  conception  of 
organism  than  anything  that  physiology  alone  can  furnish. 
In  its  domain  we  get  beyond  physical,  chemical  and  physio- 
logical laws,  as  we  know  those  laws,  just  as  in  the  domain  of 
physiology  we  get  beyond  physical  and  chemical  laws,  as  we 
know  physical  and  chemical  laws  ;  we  meet  with  higher 
autonomies,  but  in  no  case,  not  even  in  the  highest,  is  it  an 
inspiration  from  heaven  which  giveth  the  autonomy ;  it  is 
always  the  inspiration  that  is  on  earth  and  is  manifested  in 
every  pulse  of  evolution. 

The  will  of  man  being  the  outcome  of  supreme  reason  is 
the  highest  and  latest  evolved  energy  in  nature ;  it  is  in 
fact  the  power  by  which  nature  developing  through  man 
accomplishes  the  progressing  path  of  its  destiny,  the  nature- 
made  mean  by  which  nature  is  made  better.  Acted  upon 
continually  by  his  environment,  physical  and  social,  and 
reacting  upon  it,  man  incorporates  by  involution  in  the 
structure  and  constitution  of  his  nervous  system  the  essential 
abstractions  of  these  adaptive  interactions,  co-ordinates  in 
complex  reasoning  their  manifold  relations,  and  exhibits  the 
outcome  of  energy  in  a  well-informed  will;  and  it,  in  its 
highest  expression,  is  the  initiation  of  a  new  step  in  evolution. 
Past  and  present  experiences  are  its  constituent  factors,  but 
it  is  itself  more  than  experience,  for  it  is  productive,  creative, 
thus  pushing  forth  prophetically  into  the  unknown.  Like 
instinct,  in  the  realisation  of  its  energy  it  seeks  for  what  it 
has  not  and  knows  not ;  indeed,  in  its  true  creative,  which  is 
its  least  conscious,  expression  we  might  describe  it  as  the 
highest  instinct  of  development.  In  that  supreme  function 
it  is  not  attended  with  any  consciousness  of  freedom,  because 
man  is  then  one  with  nature,  his  relations  with  it  not  broken 
into  conscious  incompletenesses,  but  consciousness  absorbed 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  191 

and  extinguished  in  their  full  harmony.  It  may  be  the  senti- 
ment of  freedom  that  he  has  is  not  really  the  sentiment  of 
his  own  freedom,  as  he  supposes,  but  the  sentiment  of  the 
freedom  of  nature  working  in  him,  he  being  a  poor  channel 
of  it ;  for  as  he  by  his  nature  as  individual  is  part  only  of  a 
whole,  he  cannot  in  that  relation  be  free.  But  the  whole 
which,  encompassing  him,  yet  works  in  him,  may  seem  to 
his  self-consciousness  free,  and  so  produce  the  illusion  of  his 
freedom ;  its  part  in  him  having  a  dimly  conscious  intimation 
of  its  share  in  the  being  and  freedom  of  that  which  transcends 
him.  In  any  case,  however,  it  is  not  so  much  a  definite 
consciousness  as  an  indefinite  thrill  of  sentiment,  which  we 
translate  into  a  too  definite  consciousness.  Now  the  right 
aim  of  will  must  plainly  be  to  escape  from  the  limitation  of 
self  and  to  gain  the  full  freedom  of  nature  by  becoming  one 
with  it — to  surmount  self  by  losing  the  consciousness  of  self. 
Freewill  then  is  not  the  relic  of  a  higher  faculty  which  man 
once  had  in  the  past,  it  is  rather  an  aim  or  ideal  of  the 
future ;  a  creation  of  the  imagination  which  inflames  the 
notion  of  duty  and  fortifies  the  ought  through  the  desire 
that  it  inspires  to  realise  the  ideal. 

The  path  of  moral  law  in  social  evolution  is  without 
doubt  the  present  aim  of  the  highest  will ;  and  it  is  in  the 
inspiration  of  this  aim,  and  in  the  autonomy  of  the  function, 
that  we  discover  the  origin  and  the  authority  of  the  cate- 
gorical moral  imperative.  Thou  shalt  go  the  right  way  of 
development,  thou  shalt  not  go  the  wrong  way  of  degenera- 
tion :  such  the  explicit  declaration  of  its  instinctive  beat  in 
the  heart,  such  the  reason  of  the  understanding  confirming 
the  deeper  reason  of  the  heart.  Believing  ourselves  the  best 
in  nature  we  are  bound  to  believe  the  moral  aspirations  of 
the  best  specimens  of  us  to  represent  the  highest  point  of 
the  evolution  of  will,  and  to  mark  the  direction  of  its  future 
development.  The  basis  and  sanction  of  morality,  whatever 
its  subjective  value,  has  its  clear  objective  value  and  warrant 
in  the  welfare  and  progress  of  the  social  organism  which  it 
promotes.  Were  the  internal  sanction  abolished  the  external 
authority  would  still  be  imperative.'  That  is  a  consideration 
*  Should  it  turn  out  in  the  end  that  morality  has  this  inner  authority  in 


192  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

whicli  may  embolden  us  to  dispense  witli  tlie  multitudinous 
theoretical  discussions  concerning  the  supernatural  source 
and  authority  of  the  internal  sanction  ;  and  the  more  easily  so 
since  such  disquisitions  for  the  most  part  are  reweavings 
of  the  same  quantity  of  old  substance  into  more  or  less  new 
patterns  according  to  the  predilections  of  the  performers, 
laborious  attempts  to  get  explicit  in  the  inference  more  than 
is  implicit  in  the  premiss.  Now  a  real  addition  to  knowledge 
can  take  place  only  by  a  positive  addition  to  the  substance  ; 
and  that  must  come  not  from  subjective  exploration  but  from 
objective  observation.  The  rule  of  morality  is  implicit  in 
practice  before  it  is  explicit  in  thought — must  be  acquired  by 
involution  before  it  can  be  unfolded  in  evolution ;  and  the 
basis  of  it  must  be  sought  where  the  substance  of  all  thought 
has  to  be  sought — in  conduct.  It  is  not  from  consciousness 
but  from  life  that  the  obligation  comes  primarily.  A  logical 
machine  might  conceivably  draw  the  inference  which  is 
implicit  in  the  premiss  ;  the  acutest  understanding  will  not 
elicit  and  unfold  the  theory  that  is  not  latent  in  the  practice. 
Notwithstanding  the  many  differences  in  the  qualities  and 
quantity  of  the  moral  contents  among  different  nations  and 
in  different  ages,  there  is  everywhere  discovei'able  this  com- 
mon positive  basis — namely,  the  obligation  to  follow  a  line 
of  conduct  sanctioned  as  good,  and  to  avoid  a  line  of  conduct 
prohibited  as  bad,  by  the  social  body ;  the  bad  actions  being 
such  as  were  believed  to  be  hurtful,  and  ihe  good  actions 
such  as  were  believed  to  be  useful  to  it.  By  no  means  was 
it  thereby  hindered  from  happening,  as  it  did  indeed  happen, 
that  the  prohibitions  and  sanctions  esteemed  moral  in  a 
rude  society  were  such  as  would  be  deemed  actually  immoral 
in  a  higher  society.  The  whole  business  is  relative :  the 
individual  member  of  a  community  must  have  a  regard 
beyond  self  in  the  larger  regard  which  he  owes  to  the 
welfare  of  the  whole ;  the  particular  community  again  must 
have  regard  to  a  larger  whole  than  itself,  and  that  whole,  even 
if  national,  to  the  larger  whole  of  humanity ;  so  that  it  may 

intuition,  this  practical  imperative  of  pure  consciousness,  then  it  will  have 
the  good  fortune  to  enjoy  a  double  certitude,  because  of  the  agreement  in  it 
of  the  two  independent  methods  by  which  it  is  established. 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  193 

,  -well  happen  that  an  act  that  is  moral  in  its  immediate 
relations  is  immoral  in  its  relations  to  the  larger  whole — - 
for  example,  self-sacrificing  devotion  to  an  individual  a  sin 
against  society,  a  patriotic  sacrifice  of  self  to  the  nation  a 
crime  against  humanity.  The  inspiration  of  the  larger 
whole  imparts  the  ideal  to  which  the  aspiration  is.  See 
what  happens  now  when  a  person  of  lofty  virtue  does  not 
get  the  approbation  which  he  feels  that  his  conduct  deserves, 
but  instead  thereof  is  misunderstood  and  misinterpreted. 
He  appeals  in  his  heart  to  an  ideal  moral  sentiment — to  one, 
as  it  were,  within  him  with  whom  he  is  in  intuitive  moral 
communion,  and  reconciles  himself  to  suffer  wrong  patiently 
in  the  sure  conviction  that  his  conscience  is  the  approving 
voice  of  that  power  within  hira :  in  other  words,  he  appeals 
to  the  ideal  moral  feeling  of  humanity  immanent  in  him,  the 
ideal,  that  is,  which  humanity  pursues,  enjoining  it  in  his 
conscience,  and  which  he,  personifying  it  in  his  own  image, 
as  his  habit  is,  interprets  as  *  God  spake  these  words  and 
said.*  And  here  one  cannot  help  being  somewhat  disturbed 
by  the  question — To  what  larger  whole  than  itself  shall 
humanity  have  regard  ?  Will  it  discover  for  itself  a  saving 
ideal  in  aspirations  to  do  the  service  of  a  cosmical  whole  ? 
Or  will  it  be  left  finally  without  an  ideal  ?  When  it  comes 
to  pass  that  humanity,  fully  constituted,  is  sensible  of  no 
vital  relation  to  anything  higher  and  larger  than  itself,  and 
longs  for  no  fuller  life  in  the  aim  to  attain  a  higher  life 
outside  itself,  it  will  then  have  reached  the  term  of  its  de- 
velopment and  the  beginning  of  the  end.  The  impulse  of 
evolution  will  have  been  exhausted  in  it. 

We  think  habitually  of  will  as  individual  and  conscious 
activity,  a  witting  energy,  the  conscious  outcome  of  careful 
deliberation  looking  before  and  after;  but  when  we  think  of 
its  operation  in  the  evolution  of  mankind,  it  is  necessary  to 
think  of  it  rather  as  unconscious,  blind,  instinctive,  preg- 
nant with  a  future  which,  hidden  in  its  aspirations,  it  brings 
to  pass  :  it  is  a  mighty  tide  of  becoming  that  is  broken  into 
so  many  ripples  of  individual  and  conscious  energies,  a  deep 
tranquil  stream  which,  flowing  beneath  the  tumultuous 
waves  and  angry  surges  of  the  surface,  makes  aspirations 


194  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

prophecies,  and  man  in  his  progress  ever  wiser  than  his 
creeds.  One  might  compare  it  in  this  respect  to  the  instinct 
of  the  insect  which,  having  never  seen  its  parents,  lays  up  a 
store  of  food  for  a  progeny  that  it  will  never  see;  or  might 
perhaps  describe  it  in  St.  Paul's  words  as  the  earnest  expec- 
tation of  creation  that  waiteth  for  a  fulfilment,  which,  how- 
ever, when  it  has  come,  becomes  the  immediate  basis  of  a 
new  expectation.  Each  mortal,  eager  in  busy  energy,  does 
his  little  piece  of  work  in  his  particular  sphere,  consciously 
or  unconsciously  aiding  or  hindering  the  development  of  the 
social  organism  of  which  he  is  a  part ;  but  it  is  not  any  part 
but  the  whole,  not  a  unit  but  the  organism  in  its  integral 
form,  which  gives  the  destined  direction  to  the  sum  of  the 
functions  of  its  many  and  various  units — that  is  to  say, 
which  creates  the  ideal  to  which  the  individual  aspires. 
The  sum  of  the  multitudinous  units  of  consciousness  is  a 
moving  whole  which,  though  vaguely  consensible  perhaps,  is 
"  not  conscious.  For  the  great  organism  of  humanity  does  not 
foresee  where  it  is  going  as  it  progresses,  nor  deliberately 
foreordain  its  path  of  evolution;  it  has  no  common  senso- 
rium,  so  to  speak — as  it  may  one  day  have,  should  the 
vao-uely  consensible  become  the  definitely  conscious — whereby 
to  attain  unity  of  feeling  and  to  direct  consciously  its 
course ;  it  moves  forward  in  development  slowly,  irregularly, 
intermittently  or  remittently,  blindly,  answering  in  its  move- 
ment no  doubt  to  the  sum  of  the  energies  of  its  constituents 
in  relation  to  its  environment,  but  at  the  same  time  inform- 
ing and  determining  the  units  of  the  future  by  imparting  to 
them  their  idealism.  Mighty  busy  beings  for  a  little  while 
are  the  units,  but  infinitesimally  minute  aids  or  hindrances 
to  the  great  movement  of  evolution  whose  end  they  know 
not. 

To  speak  of  the  will  of  man  as  a  mode  of  a  universal  will 
y^  in  nature,  tempting  though  it  be,  ought  not  to  be  allowed  to 
pass  as  if  it  were  not  a  piece  of  pure  anthropomorphism. 
We  have  no  actual  right  to  conclude  from  the  character  of 
the  conditioned  conscious  energy  in  us  as  to  the  character 
of  the  unconditioned  energy  outside  us ;  for  it  is  the  mark  of 
our  limitation,  not  the  warrant  of  objective  truth,  that  we 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS   OF  EVOLUTION.  195 

cannot  do  otlierwise  than  represent  the  power  outside  our- 
selves in  terms  of  ourselves.  We  please  ourselves  to  in- 
terpret it  in  the  language  of  experience,  but  it  is  actually 
uninterpretable  in  that  language.  A  chemical  molecule, 
were  it  capable  of  it,  might  just  as  well  conclude  that  the  one 
prevailing  energy  of  which  its  particular  energy  was  a  mode 
was  chemical  energy.  Himself  a  moment  between  those  im- 
jpotences  of  thought  which  he  calls  infinities,  man's  will  is 
_iiecessarily  the  poor  reflex  of  his  limitations;  what  is  true  of 
it  cannot  possibly  be  true  of  that  which  has  not  his  nor  any 
limitations ;  and  to  describe  it  at  all  in  words  which,  being 
human,  are  meaningless  in  such  application — even  so  much  as 
'  to  name  it — is  only  a  little  less  anthropomorphic  than  to  speak 
of  it  as  the  Will  of  a  Personal  God  made  in  the  image  of  man. 
For  assuredly,  when  we  think  well  of  it,  it  was  not  God  who 
made  man  in  his  image,  it  is  man  who  has  always  made  God 
in  his  image ;  in  the  image  of  man  has  he  made  Him. 

How  far  jias  Kant  really  advanced  matters  by  his  great 
doctrine  of  practical  reason?  In  proclaiming  the  freedom 
of  will  and  the  moral  imperative  to  be  not,  like  the  know- 
ledge acquired  by  the  understanding,  relative  and  pheno- 
menal, but  the  thing-in-itself,  absolute,  incomprehensible — 
feelable  in  some  strange  fashion,  though  not  knowable,  by  a 
self — he  has  done  little  more  than  translate  into  his  philo- 
sophical language,  and  into  language  which,  being  relative, 
will  not  anyhow  carry  the  absolute  thing-in-itself,  the  com- 
mon opinion  of  a  Divine  inspiration ;  for  what  he  has  done 
is  to  ascribe  to  in  comprehensible  freewill  the  place  of  that 
incomprehensible  which  men  call  God,  and  to  put  the  cate- 
gorical moral  imperative  in  the  stead  of  '  God  spake  these 
words  and  said.'  With  this  disadvantage  too :  that  whereas 
what  God  spake  and  said  was  clear,  certain,  precise,  and 
absolutely  authoritative,  we  are  left  by  Kant  without  any 
certain  criterion  of  what  the  moral  imperative  categorically 
ordains  in  the  particular  case ;  are  referred  in  our  troubles 
of  conscience  to  the  common-place  utilitarian  standard  of 
the  good  of  society.  Moreover,  what  is  to  be  said  of  the 
consistency  of  a  philosophy  which,  pronouncing  all  know- 
ledge to   be  phenomenal  and  relative,  in  the  same  breath 


196  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

declares  any  aflPection  of  an  individual  self,  let  it  be  the  senti- 
ment or  intuition  of  liberty  or  duty,  to  be  more  than  rela- 
tive? 

It  is  the  fashion  nowadays  among  metaphysical  psycho- 
logists to  assume  that  we  owe  to  Kant's  critical  acumen  the 
modern  doctrine  of  the  relativity  of  knowledge,  and  they 
almost  imply,  from  the  great  credit  Avhich  they  award  him, 
that  but  for  him  modern  science  could  not  have  existed. 
But  the  doctrine  of  the  relativity  of  knowledge  was  not  his 
discovery ;  we  owe  it  really  to  the  discoveries  of  the  physio- 
logists who  made  known  the  true  functions  of  the  senses ; 
and  it  might  be  argued  with  some  show  of  reason  that  if 
Kant  were  dropped  clean  out  between  Hume  and  modern 
science  its  positive  gains  would  be  very  much  what  they  are 
now.  Whenever  a  good  stream  of  positive  scientific  thought 
begins  to  emerge  from  its  brooding  latency  into  explicit 
light  it  easily  runs  into  two  different  courses :  the  one  an 
easy,  vague,  dispersive  expression  in  theoretical  and  more  or 
less  ingenious  disquisitions,  by  which  it  is  soon  dissipated 
in  wasteful  inanities  of  bog  and  marsh ;  the  other,  a  slow, 
tedious,  sober,  and  fruitful  progress  through  patient  scientific 
observations  and  verifications.  The  actual  filiation  was  not 
from  Kant  to  modern  science,  as  his  disciples  assume,  but 
from  the  stream  of  tendency  of  which  Kant  was  a  meta- 
physical offshoot.  Hegel  supplies  an  example  of  a  similar 
metaphysical  deviation  from  the  quiet  stream  of  positive 
science.  The  modern  doctrine  of  organic  evolution,  or  pro- 
gressive development,  as  it  used  to  be  called,  is  much  the 
same  as  Hegel's  fundamental  doctrine  of  the  immanent 
spontaneous  evolution  of  the  absolute ;  indeed  it  is  the  same 
doctrine  set  forth  in  terms  of  matter  instead  of  terms  of 
metaphysics.  Self-evolution  of  the  absolute,  progressing 
from  difference  to  differ ence^  these  differences,  themselves 
mere  moments  within  it,  being  combined  into  higher  and 
higher  unity :  the  absolute  impelled  by  the  principle  of 
progress  within  itself  to  higher  and  higher  differences,  and 
through  them  to  higher  and  higher  unity : — what  is  that  but 
the  progress  from  the  simple  and  general  to  the  complex 
and  special  which    in  Hegel's  time  was  recognised  as  the 


CEETAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  197 

order  of  organic  development,  and  which  since  his  time 
has  become  known  as  the  law  of  evolution  through 
differences  to  more  complex  unities.  To  conclude,  however, 
that  the  scientific  conception  of  evolution,  whose  true 
modern  parentage  lies  mainly  with  Yon  Baer  and  Lamarck, 
owes  its  origin  in  any  degree  to  Hegel,  would  be  grossly 
absurd.  Indeed,  it  is  pretty  certain  that  if  Hegel  and  all 
his  works  had  been  thrown  into  the  sea,  and  no  mention 
more  heard  of  him  and  them,  the  scientific  conception  of 
evolution  would  not  have  been  delayed  an  hour.  Another 
striking  example  of  the  speculative  deviation  of  positive 
thought  from  its  true  path  of  sober  progress  is  in  process  of 
display  at  the  present  day.  Since  Darwin  brought  the 
doctrine  of  evolution  into  the  fuU  current  of  scientific 
thought,  and  aroused  the  eager  attention  of  all  the  world  to 
it,  by  his  admirable  exposition  of  natural  selection  as  the 
main  means  of  its  accomplishment,  there  has  been  a  large 
development  of  purely  theoretical  philosophy  in  which  evo- 
lution has  been  tracked  with  overstrained  ingenuity  into  all 
holes  and  corners  of  nature,  and  a  word  meaning  the  un- 
folding or  becoming  of  things  has  been  proved  triumphantly 
to  explain  how  all  things  have  become.  In  the  meantime 
the  quiet  stream  of  positive  scientific  inquiry  into  the  par- 
ticular problems  of  evolution,  along  which  the  real  fruit  will 
have  to  be  gathered  at  the  last,  makes  slow  way  and  obtains 
little  notice. 

To  return  to  the  course  of  our  inquiry.  Having  found 
the  basis  of  freewiU  and  of  the  moral  sanction  in  the  evolu- 
tional nisus  in  its  social  sphere,  I  go  on  now  to  inquire 
whether  some  other  fundamental  beliefs  are  not  similarly 
rooted  in  it.  Without  doubt  there  have  prevailed  very 
widely,  though  not  universally,  among  mankind  the  sad 
tradition  of  a  lost  or  forfeited  life  of  perfection  and  happi- 
ness and  a  dim  expectation  or  the  firm  assurance  of  a  future 
life  of  perfection  and  happiness.  Now  if  we  know  anything 
certain  of  the  beginnings  of  human  life  it  is  that  man  has 
risen  in  estate,  not  fallen  from  a  higher  estate — at  any  rate 
on  earth,  whatever  may  have  been  the  case  on  the  moon  or 
on  Mars  when  they  were  theatres  of  life ;  that  there  never 


198  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

was  such  a  golden  age  of  peace  and  happiness  as  he  has 
fabled ;  that  he  has  never  been  greater  and  nobler  than  he 
is  now.  Moreover,  if  we  can  predict  anything  safely  in  this 
business  from  the  basis  of  our  existing  natural  knowledge, 
we  can  predict  that  though  he  may  well  rise  higher  than  he 
is  now,  he  will  not  have  any  such  life  after  death  as  he  has 
consoled  and  beguiled  himself  by  imagining.  Where  then 
has  he  obtained  his  tradition  of  a  glorious  past?  Whence 
have  come  to  him  those  immortal  longings  that  make  him 
feel 

Through  all  his  fleshly  dress 
Bright  shoots  of  everlastingness  1 

Theologians  naturally  declare  them  to  be  the  intuitions  of j 

4     a  special  religious  sense,  since  they  are  sure  the  systematised        ^ 
knowledge  of  sense  and  reason  cannot  give  a  satisfactory  ac-         | 
__  ^      count  of  them.    Whencesoever  derived,  they  must  have  their 
sufficient  reason ;  their  influence  in  human  events  has  been 
unspeakably  momentous ;  and  no  science  of  human  nature 
can  be    complete  which  fails  to  take  adequate  account  of 
them  and  their  effects,  and  to  tell  us  how  they  have  come, 
if  they  have  a  natural  origin.     Are  we  not  entitled  to  look 
upon  them  as  the  imaginative  interpretations  of  an  instinct^ 
springing  into  consciousness  from  the  upward  striving  im- 
pulse which,  immanent  in  man  as  part  and  crown  of  organic 
"nature,  ever  throbs  in  his  heart  as  the   inspiration  of  hope, 
of  aspiration,  of  faith  in  things  unseen?     Imagination,  as 
its  manner  is,  constructs  modes  or  forms  of  satisfaction  of 
the   instinct   in   conformity  with   the   co-existing   state   of 
mental  development;  and  accordingly  the  schemes  of  future 
fulfilment  invented  by  different  peoples  in  different  epochs 
do  not  fail  to  present  a  considerable  variety,  and  to  differ 
too  in  character  according  to  the  different  characters  of  the 
peoples  of  the  same  epoch ;  not  otherwise  than  as  the  '  bon 
y^    Dieu'  of  France  differs  from  the  'God '  of  a  Scotch  Calvinist.     y^ 
Certainly  it  was  not  difficult  for  man  at  any  time  to  picture 
to  himself  a  much  happier  life  than  he  was  living,  since  he    • 
could  easily  imagine  it  without  its  most  urgent  present  suf- 
ferings, just  as  he  could  imagine  men  who  were  giants  or 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS   OF  EVOLUTION.  199 

who  lived  for  a  thousand  years  ;  it  was  not  surprising  there- 
fore that  he  should  conclude  the  feeling  of  a  happier  possi- 
bility to  be  either  the  consequence,  the  faint  reminiscence,  of 
a  better  life  which  had  been  actually  lived  before  historical 
time,  or  the  dim  forefeeling,  the  prophetic  instinct,  of  a 
better  life  to  come — either  a  Paradise  of  the  past  or  a  Para- 
dise of  the  future.  We  conclude  then  that  these  inventions, 
adapted,  like  poetical  justice,  to  give  the  mind  satisfaction 
in  that  wherein  the  nature  of  things  denies  it,  have  sprung 
from  the  instinctive  forefeeling  of  a  higher  human  destiny 
with  which  the  nisus  of  evolution  working  in  and  through 
man  inspires  his  imagination.     Given  the  instinct,  which  is 

^_ indisputable,  it  is  easy  to  understand  how  all  the  rest  must 

^. follow,  when  we  reflect  upon  the  way  imagination  has  worked 

to  people  the  unknown  with  extraordinary  beings  constructed 
after  the  fashion  of  its  ordinary  experience,  but  on  a  much 
larger  scale  of  goodness  and  grandeur,  or  of  badness  and 
terror — gods,  that  is,  of  the  earth  and  the  air,  of  unseen 
upper  and  unseen  under  regions,  anthropomorphic  personifi- 
cations of  the  unknown  powers  of  nature  that  awed  man 
into  abasement  and  adoration. 

The  psychologist  who  discovers  an  adequate  philosophy  of 
mind  by  peering  into  his  own  mind,  thus  making  his  con- 
sciousness the  measure  of  the  universe  of  thought  and  things, 
is  content  to  think  he  has  explained  something  when  he  has 
pronounced  it  to  be  the  work  of  the  imagination  or  the  ima- 
ginative faculty :  by  invoking  diligently  his  own  conscious- 
_ness  he  has  had  this  pregnant  oracle  uttered  to  him — to  wit, 
that  mind  working  in  that  mode  which  it  is  agreed  to  call 
imagination  has  done  it.  Meanwhile  he  revf^als  mighty  little 
'  by  the  discovery  to  any  one  who  has  not  the  Brahmin-like 
faculty  of  obtaining  intuition  by  gazing  intently  at  his  own 
navel.  What  we  really  want  to  know  is  not  whether  Imagi- 
nation, (pavraa-La,  Einhildung,  or  any  other  descriptive  term 
has  done  it,  but  what  is  the  foundation  of  this  productive  or 
creative  function  of  mind  which  is  so  named,  and  what  are 
its  material  correlates  in  bodily  structure  and  function  ?  It 
is  obvious  that  experience  and  reason  can  only  acquaint  us 
with  the  actual  and  its  relations,  taking  us  along  the  beaten 


/  I 


200  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

tracks  of  things  as  they  are,  and  instructing  us  how  to  move 
from  one  to  another;  they  never  can,  as  imagination  does, 
inspire  and  urge  us  to  strike  out  the  nevsr  paths  of  things  as 
they  are  not ;  to  combine  and  arrange  the  actual  of  experi- 
ence into  new  forms  of  thought,  so  '  bodying  forth  the  forms 
of  things  unknown,'  and  giving  *  to  aery  nothings  a  local  habi- 
tation and  a  name ;  *  to  frame  theories  that  shall  fit  experi- 
ences never  had,  and  to  foresee  and  foretell  what  those 
experiences  will  be ;  to  fashion  ideals,  *  creating  every  bad  a 
perfect  best.'  These  operations  are  the  effects  and  evidence 
of  the  evolutional  nisus  working  in  the  nature  of  man,  in 
mind  as  the  highest  outcome  of  it,  and  in  imagination  as 
the  highest  function  of  mind ;  wherefore  the  best  products 
of  imagination  are  the  last  events  of  the  evolution  of  nature, 
they  represent  the  highest  becoming  thereof  through  man. 
Here  indeed  it  is  that  we  catch  nature  putting  forth  the 
shoots  of  its  latest  development,  many  of  them  certainly 
vain  and  abortive,  like  the  countless  multitudes  of  seeds  and 
germs  that  come  to  naught,  but  others  of  them  that  live  and 
thrive,  and  so  do  their  part  to  carry  on  the  evolution  of  the 
great  organism  of  humanity. 

In  this  relation  let  it  be  borne  well  in  mind  always, 
that  imagination  cannot  work  in  its  best  productive  way 
except  it  be  fed  and  sustained  and  informed  by  an  under- 
standing that  is  of  large  capacity  and  good  culture,  is  in 
wide  and  exact  and  intimate  sympathy  with  nature,  social 
and  physical,  and  thus  gathers  up  what  is  behind  and 
around,  combines  it  in  true  forms  of  thought,  and  lays  a 
sound  and  solid  basis  for  the  forward-reaching  work  of  ima- 
ginative creation.  Not  voluntary  nor  even  conscious  are  its 
workings ;  they  are  mobile,  spontaneous,  capricious,  and  un- 
certain, not  subiect  to  direct  mental  control  and  not  to  be 
explained  by  logic.  The  voluntary  aim  should  be  to  lay  up  in 
a  well-trained  understanding  a  good  store  of  co-ordinated 
material  and  of  sound  notional  relations  by  which  it  may  be 
fitly  fed  and  informed.  Goethe  said  of  himself,  *What  I 
have  not  loved  I  have  never  translated  into  verse  or  prose. 
I  have  never  made  love-poems  when  I  was  not  in  love ;  *  nor 
"did  he  write  poems  about  nature  without  being   informed 


CEKTAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS   OF  EVOLUTION.  201 

with  facts  gathered  from  every  source,  whicli  lie  allowed  to 
sink  deep  into  his  mind  and  to  brood  there  until  thej  came 
^rth  animate  in  fit  imaginative  forms  of  truth  and  beauty. 
Divorced  from  a  good  understanding,  imagination  strays  into 
all  sorts  of  fanciful  vagaries — into  reckless  generalisations 
and  ill-grounded  hypotheses  in  science,  into  wild  theories  in 
politics,  into  extravagant  inanities  in  poetry,  into  ill-con- 
ceived and  ridiculous  productions  of  art,  into  thin  evolutions 
of  all  sorts  wanting  the  substantial  basis  of  previous  involu- 
tions ;  but  these  abortive  vagaries  are  so  many  proofs  of  the 
inexhaustible  strength  of  its  ever-budding  life  :  countless  vari- 
ations that  perish  if  so  be  that  one  live  and  thrive,  ^eldom 
indeed,  not  more  than  once  in  a  century  perhaps,  is  it  in- 
spired by  the  highest  reason,  and  its  work  clothed  in  the 
forms  thereof.  To  look  back  upon  the  incalculable  amount 
and  the  inexhaustible  variety  of  work  which,  ill  nourished 
by  observation,  and  ill  informed  by  reason,  it  has  done  in  the 
past,  on  the  vast  waste  of  energy  which  its  records  show,  is 
to  lay  a  solid  basis  of  hope  of  the  progress  it  will  make  in 
time  to  come  when  it  shall  be  well  nourished  by  sound  obser- 
vation and  well  informed  by  enlightened  reason. 

It  is  evident  that  true  imagination  is  vastly  different  from 
fancy ;  far  from  being  merely  a  playful  outcome  of  mental 
activity,  a  thing  of  joy  and  beauty  only,  it  performs  the  ini- 
tial and  essential  functions  in  every  branch  of  human  deve- 
lopment. And  has  always  done  so,  even  though  its  products, 
after  having  discharged  their  temporary  functions,  have 
dwindled  and  disappeared ;  for  always  it  has  peopled  that 
realm  of  the  ideal  which  has  countervailed  the  oppression 
and  gloom  of  the  real.  How  could  men  ever  have  faced  suc- 
cessfully in  the  first  instance  the  unknown,  vast  and  over- 
whelming forces  of  nature,  how  welded  themselves  under 
their  pressure  into  the  unity,  confidence,  and  strength  of 
social  growth,  if  they  had  not  created  for  themselves  gods  of 
the  air,  of  the  earth,  and  of  the  sea,  of  the  hearth,  of  the 
city,  and  of  the  nation,  whose  anger  they  might  hope  to  pro- 
pitiate, and  whose  favour  they  might  hope  to  win  ?  Could 
the  Israelites,  though  pliant,  patient  and  tenacious  then  as 

now,  have  made  their  painful  way  through  the  wilderness 
14 


202  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

from  tlie  bondage  of  Egypt  to  the  promised  land  of  Canaan 
■without  their  strong  faith  in  the  special  and  jealous  God.  of 
Israel,  greater  than  the  gods  of  the  heathen,  who  divided  for 
them  the  waters  of  the  sea,  sent  them  food  from  heaven, 
caused  water  to  gush  out  of  the  stony  rock,  set  his  interpos- 
ing fiat  between  the  dead  and  the  living,  and  stayed  the 
plague  by  which  they  were  devastated?  *And  the  Lord 
prospered  him  in  everything  that  he  did,  because  he  did 
that  which  was  right  in  the  sight  of  the  Lord,'  would  be  the 
approving  comment  that  a  Jewish  historian  would  make 
upon  the  character  and  doings  of  a  ruler  who,  outside  the 
tribal  or  national  bounds,  had  been  a  monster  of  savage  ini- 
quity, and  who,  had  he  lived  now,  would  be  thought  to  have 
earned  eternal  infamy.  But  the  Jehovah  of  Jewish  worship, 
/^  \y  though  nominally  accepted  still,  is  virtually  a  conception  of 
"^  the  past,  like  Jove,  Vishnu,  and  Baal,  and  other  extinct  gods, 
having  been  practically  superseded  by  a  higher  conception  of 
Deity.  For  imagination  is  nowise  disheartened  because  its 
offspring  perish  one  after  another;  with  never  failing  pro- 
ductive energy  it  goes  on  to  create  anew,  taking  refuge  in 
heaven  when  driven  from  earth,  throwing  the  soft  glamour 
of  the  ideal  over  the  sadness  of  the  real,  infusing  the  faith 
and  hope  that  inspire  the  strife  of  life  and  console  its  close. 

Let  me  take  notice  here  how  admirably  the  evolutional 
tiisus  in  its  two  aspects  of  the  objective  in  nature  and  of  the 
subjective  in  imagination  is  identified,  becoming  one,  as  it 
were,  in  the  passion  and  fruition  of  love ;  how  the  sensual 
need  and  impulse  works  intimately  with  the  imagination,  in- 
spiring  it  and  clothing  itself  with  the  colours  and  forms 
thereof,  so  as  to  make  the  union  the  complete  and  ecstatic 
exercise  of  the  energies  of  the  whole  being ;  a  rapture  of 
delight  blending  the  individual  and  nature  for  the  moment 
in  an  act  which  the  most  highly  rational  beings  hasten  to 
hide  as  a  shame,  and  than  which,  objectively  regarded, 
there  is  not  anything  more  ridiculous  in  all  the  world. 
The  supreme  joy  in  nature  is  plainly  production  or  creation, 
subjective  or  objective,  and  the  supremest  joy  that  pro- 
ductive activity  in  which  they  are  identified.  Behold  how 
specially  bride  and  bridegroom  are  adorned  for  the  function, 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  203 

and  with  what  hymeneal  joy  and  festivities  their  union  is 
solemnised,  as  well  in  the  bright  homes  of  civilisation  as  in 
the  cruelty-full  habitations  of  the  dark  places  of  the  earth  ; 
how  vegetable  and  animal  nature  is  arrayed  in  its  most 
glorious  apparel,  and  the  irrepressible  joy  thereof  bursts 
forth  in  multitudinous  ecstasies  and  harmonies  of  odours, 
colours  and  songs;  how  man  is  transported  with  similar 
pleasure,  not  in  the  lower  sphere  of  his  sensual  nature  only, 
but  in  the  ideal  regions  of  art,  poetry,  and  religion !  For  it 
is  the  privilege  of  his  high  and  complex  mental  organisation 
to  absorb  and  mentally  transform  the  physical  impulse  and 
to  expend  its  energy  in  ideal  creations  of  the  imagination — 
in  spiritual  generation. 

If  the  imagination  has  so  important  and  essential  a 
function  in  the  development  of  mankind  as  I  have  indicated, 
the  question  may  well  be  asked  whether,  after  all,  the 
understanding  is  the  only  mint  from  which  truth  issues; 
whether  in  fact  the  imagination  is  not  perhaps  an  organ  of 
truths  that  are  not  truths  of  the  understanding.  Why 
should  the  last  word  be  the  thinker's  ?  Or  why  should  he 
think  that  in  any  matter  he  has  spoken  the  last  word  P  The 
understanding  reveals  a  phenomenal  world  standing  forth 
from  a  background  of  the  unperceivable ;  for  assuredly 
beyond  all  forms  or  modes  of  man's  apprehension  there  is 
that  which  has  not  undergone,  and  cannot  undergo,  form  or 
mode  in  his  consciousness.  Indeed,  is  it  not  the  fact  that 
every  definite  idea,  every  class  of  notions  that  we  form, 
every  piece  of  positive  knowledge  that  we  gain,  is  an  arbitrary 
limitation  and  separation,  and  therefore  in  some  sort  a  falsi- 
fication ?  To  separate  in  thought  the  particular  part  from 
the  whole  with  which  it  is  in  essential  continuity  of  living 
being,  as  we  do  when  we  bring  it  under  our  conditions  of 
perception  and  conception,  is  to  make  it  a  dead  fragment 
rather  than  a  living  continuity,  in  so  far  as  we  know  it. 
However  positive,  definite,  and  true  then  knowledge  is  in 
relation  to  us,  as  relative,  there  is  nothing  more  superficial 
and  artificial  in  relation  to  the  universal  and  absolute.  In 
this  vague  and  vast  region  of  unlimited  and  unrelational, 
which  the  very  recognition  of  a  relative  and  limited  world 


204  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

of  knowledge  compels  us  fco  postulate,  and  which,  we  may 
please  ourselves  to  talk  of  as  'the  thing-in-itself  or  the  ab- 
solute, though  both  expressions  are  meaningless,^  there  is 
manifestly  room  enough  for  an  unlimited  play  of  the  imagi- 
nation. Is  it  then  perchance  that  in  this  function  of 
imagination  there  beats  the  illuminating  pulse  of  higher 
being  than  sense  can  apprehend?  Perhaps  it  is  that  the 
infinite  past  thrills  in  us,  making  a  tone  of  vague  feeling 
that  we  cannot  apprehend  in  thought  or  express  in  word's^ 
and  giving  us,  as  the  connecting  present  between  two 
eternities,  the  dim  forefeeling  of  an  endless  continuity  in 
the  future ;  that  it  is  this  formless  thrill  of  unity  with  the 
whole  and  of  continuity  without  end,  to  which  no  adequate 
reaction  on  our  part  is  possible  in  thought  or  deed,  which  is 
the  inspiration  of  imagination  and  the  basis  of  morality  and 
religion  ;  and  that  we  have  here  a  case  in  which  doubt  in- 
spired by  the  understanding  overthrows  beliefs  to  which  a 
larger  doubt  of  the  range  of  the  understanding  brings  us 
back  under  the  authority  of  imagination.  What  truths  of 
religion  then,  that  are  not  truths  of  the  understanding,  may 
not  imagination  properly  construct  on  the  basis  of  this  un- 
fathomable moral  or  religious  consciousness? 

Assuredly  it  may  construct  a  great  deal  in  that  sphere, 
since  its  energy  is  inexhaustible,  its  exercise  a  pleasure,  and 
it  has  ample  scope  enough ;  but  the  real  question  is  whether 
it  is  qualified  to  construct  truly  there,  when  it  does  so  in 
defiance  and  even  in  direct  contradiction  of  understanding. 
In  the  progressive  becoming  of  knowledge  imagination  antici- 

'  Not  to  go  back  to  what  has  been  previously  said  about  this  matter,  I  may 
simply  note  here  that,  inasmuch  as  all  meaning  cannot  be  other  than  relative, 
the  only  absolute,  if  any,  is  that  which  we  get  in  the  relative,  the  only  '  thing- 
in-itself  '  that  which  we  get  in  the  phenomenon :  that  is  to  say,  we  know 
nothing  of  the  absolute  until  it  is  no  longer  absolute,  of  the  thing-in-itself 
until  it  is  the  thing-out-of -itself.  Hardly  less  imbecile  is  the  assertion  that 
the  absolute,  though  not  a  conception,  is  yet  a  state  of  consciousness.  As  if 
every  state  of  consciousness  were  not  just  as  relative  as  any  conception.  The 
vague  feeling  or  dim  notion  that  we  tMnk  we  have  of  the  absolute  is  really 
the  relative  with  as  many  of  its  relations  as  possible  got  rid  of — the  most 
general  and  abstract  relative,  in  fact,  that  we  can  arrive  at.  Obviously  any 
particular  absolute,  such  as  absolute  truth,  absolute  good,  must  be  a  greater 
absurdity  still. 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  205 

_pates  understanding,  foreteUing  the  immediate  to  he  before 
it  definitely  is ;  in  the  common  use  of  it  in  scientific  inquiry, 
for  example,  the  theory  which  it  constructs  precedes  the 
demonstration  by  which,  after  being  tested  and  proved  by 
the  understanding,  it  is  made  knowledge ;  and  so  it  does 
actually  go  beyond  the  range  of  understanding,  stretching 
forth  into  the  future.  But  only  from  the  basis  of  under- 
standing to  come  back  to  the  test  of  understanding,  if  it  is 
of  sterling  value.  What  sort  of  theory  is  that  which  is  not 
based  upon  a  competent  appreciation  of  well  observed  facts 
and  their  relations?  And  what  sort  of  imagination  that 
which  is  not  based  upon  good,  well  trained,  and  well  informed 
understanding,  and  can  in  turn  appeal  to  the  test  of  it  ? 

Those  who  think  to  find  a  source  of  revelation  in 
imagination  should  consider  that,  constructing  for  us  things 
that  are  not,  and  sometimes  things  that  could  not  be  con- 
sistently with  the  fundamental  laws  of  mental  evolution — 
for  a  truly  based  creation  of  the  imagination,  such  as  a 
character  of  Shakspeare's,  is  more  true  than  the  particular 
real,  since  it  contains  the  essence  of  all  the  particular  reals 
of  that  kind,  as  perceived  by  a  man  of  genius,  and  by  him 
embodied  and  exhibited  to  us  in  it — it  has  been  the  cause  of 
most  of  our  errors.  They  would  not  do  amiss  to  reflect  on 
the  great  multitude  of  false  constructions  that  have  been 
made  by  it  since  the  beginning  of  its  work  upon  earth,  and 
to  examine  whether  the  plain  effects  of  some  of  them  have 
not  been,  as  the  larger  use  of  them  may  be  in  the  future,  to 
promote  not  evolution  but  degeneration  of  the  human  kind. 
For  it  is  not  unlikely  that  natural  selection  will  act  to  lead 
mankind  downhill  at  the  last  to  their  extinction  as  effectively 
as  it  now  acts  to  lead  them  uphill.  However  that  be,  these 
things  we  ought  to  make  clear  to  ourselves  in  the  matter — 
namely,  what  we  can  affirm  positively,  what  we  can  deny 
positively,  what  we  must  be  content  to  leave  unaffirmed  and 
undenied :  we  are  sure  and  can  affirm  that  a  fundamental 
impulse  of  evolution  is  felt  in  the  higher  functions  of  mind ; 
we  are  sure  and  can  affirm  that  the  impulse  comes  from  afar 
and  is  more  than  personal  in  any  proper  sense  of  the  word  ; 
we  are  entirely  in  doubt  what  it  is  essentially,  whence  it 


h^ 


A 


206  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

comes,  and  whither  it  tends,  and  are  sure  that  any  positive 
and  definite  answers  that  we  make  to  such  questions  must 
be  fables  of  the  imagination. 

Here  we  might  properly  take  notice  how  much  the 
operation  of  the  imagination  in  defective  and  deranged 
states  of  the  nervous  system  has  had  to  do  with  the  genera- 
tion and  sustenance  of  supernatural  beliefs  and  pretensions. 
Many  erroneous  beliefs  of  that  character  have  their  origin 
in  a  defective  development  of  the  understanding,  such  as  is 
natural  to  savages  and  children.  Witness,  for  example,  the 
superstitions  of  ill  omens  which  have  so  strong  a  hold  on 
barbarous  peoples,  and  indeed  are  not  extinct  in  the  most  en- 
lightened countries.  Two  events  occur  near  together,  where- 
upon they  are  connected  in  the  mind  as  cause  and  efiFect, 
though  they  have  no  causal  relation  whatever,  their  concur- 
rence or  sequence  being  quite  accidental.  Causality  being  a 
form  of  thought  under  which  we  perceive  events,  it  is  the 
fundamental  and  universal  apprehension  of  the  understanding, 
and  an  easy  error  of  it  is  that  sequent  events  are  conse- 
quent ;  for  mankind  perceived  causality  long  before  they 
perceived  true  causes,  and  so  hastened  always  to  find  causes 
where  there  were  only  coincidences,  and  to  imaginatively 
invent  them  when  there  were  none  discernible.  The  search 
for  causes,  the  instinctive  need  to  find  out  some  antecedent 
or  connection  for  a  phenomenon,  I  take  to  be  the  consequence 
of  a  deep  practical  intuition  that  we  and  all  we  see  are 
related  parts  of  an  embracing  whole,  whereby  we  cannot 
bear  to  leave  an  event  suspended  in  the  void,  as  it  were, 
but  are  driven  always  to  endeavour  to  attach  it  somewhere. 
It  would  be  impossible  to  estimate  the  number  of  erroneous 
inferences  and  beliefs  and  superstitions  that  have  sprung 
from  the  operation  of  that  instinct — from  the  glad  and 
exuberant  exercise  of  the  imagination  to  supplement  the 
defects  of  inadequate  understanding. 

But  besides  these  products  of  an  imperfect  basis  of 
knowledge,  a  great  many  supernatural  manifestations  and 
revelations  have  been  the  manifest  progeny  of  a  brooding 
imagination  operating  from  the  unsound  basis  of  a  dis- 
ordered reason.   A  strange  and  grotesque  progeny  sometimes 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  207 

those  products,  but  not  without  extraordinary  influence  on 

the  events  of  human  history.     We  may  read  there,  if  we 

will,  how  hallucinations  of  hearing  have  been  accepted  as 

Y  J    voices  from  heaven  and  hallucinations  of  vision  as  divine 

apparitions,  and  how  whole  sections  of  communities   have         ] 
been   infected   with  a   fanatical   admiration   and   a   devout       J 
worship  of  the  delusions  of  a  monomaniac.     It  is  certainly  a      / 
very  remarkable  thing,  when  we  consider  it  well,  that  dis- 
orders of  the  nervous  system  have  played  so  great  a  part 
in  those  beliefs  which,  being  deemed  to  be  of  a  spiritual 
order,  are  esteemed  man's  best  possessions.     What  then  shall 
we  say  ?     Briefly  no  more  than  this  at  present — that  some 
of  these  disordered  ideas  were  the  accidental  concomitants 
of  a  genuine   stream  of  tendency,  incidental  offsets  of  its 
progress,  so  to  speak,  and  of  little  more  essential  signifi- 
cance  than    the   foam   in   the   steamer's   track;    and   that 
others  of  them  were  the  accompaniments  of  a  process  of 
degeneration  that  is  going  on  constantly  side  by  side  with 
a  process  of  evolution.     Not  all  peoples  survive  and  advance, 
nor  all  sections  of  a  people,  nor  all  families  of  a  section,  nor 
all  individuals  of  a  family ;  it  is  only  a  chosen   part,  and 
that  a  small  minority  of  the  whole,  which  carries  forward 
the  progress  of  humanity ;    the   huge   majority  is  at  best 
stationary  and  for  the  most  part  actually  occupied  in  de- 
generating.    In   such   case   false   beliefs,   though   accepted 
devoutly  as  of  supernatural  origin,  are  the  expressions  of  a 
defect  or  degeneration  which  they  in  turn  help  to  increase. 
The  gods  or  other  ideals  which  a  people  of  a  barbarous  a.nd 
brutal  nature  creates  for  itself  and  worships,  being  in  their 
characters    the    reflex   of    its   character   and   development, 
become  causes  that  contribute  to  perpetuate  and  increase 
the  degradation  of  the  people ;  and  among  civilised  people 
in  like  manner,  both  in  the  general  and  in  the  particular, 
the  worship  of  false  ideals  is  a  powerful  cause  of  degenera- 
tion.    The  language  is  in  want  of  a   convenient  word  to 
denote  the  opposite  of  a  true  ideal — a  word  such  as  anti- 
ideal — that  might  fitly  express  the  aim  of  tendency  which 
went  opposite  to,  or  was  a  positive  deviation  from,  the  path 
of  progress  of  humanity  in  any  direction. 


<^ 


^ 


y-~. 


U-'^'\yi^J.^ZCa^^4iLLj^  <:rr-i!^L.j^' 


V^08  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

V  Enough  concerning  a  matter  ■wLlcli,  never  yet  treated 
systematically  as  its  importance  deserves,  would  require  very 
detailed  treatment  to  have  justice  done  to  it :  suffice  it  here 
'  to  say  that  however  it  be  that  sujDernatural  revelation  comes, 
whether  from  defective  development  or  from  derangement 
of  understanding,  this  much  is  certain,  that  in  no  case  can 
it  come  to  us  otherwise  than  through  man  and  conditioned 
by  the  limitations  of  his  nature ;  he  is  the  channel  of  its 
flow  to  us  inevitably,  whatever  be  the  source,  and  therefore 
he  may  be,  for  anything  we  can  tell,  the  perverter  or  the 
actual  creator  of  the  message.  In  this  matter,  as  always, 
the  direct  testimony  of  the  witness  is  liable  to  two  serious 
fallacies — first,  that  he  may  be  deceiving  us,  and,  secondly, 
that  he  may  be  deceived  himself;  and  accordingly  we  cannot 
be  sure  we  are  not  the  victims  of  imposture  or  of  hallucina- 
tion, or,  as  not  seldom  happens  perhaps,  of  a  mixture  of  both. 
For  certainly  the  monomaniacal  enthusiast  is  apt  to  advance 
through  self-deception  into  more  or  less  conscious  imposture; 
his  expanding  course  being  commonly  to  be  deceived  himself, 
then  to  deceive  himself,  and  in  the  end  to  deceive  others. 

In  this  relation  it  is  most  necessary  to  bear  distinctly  in 
mind  that  forms  and  ceremonies,  stereotyped  propositions, 
articles  of  faith  and  dogmas  of  theology  do  not  constitute  the 
essence  of  religion  but  its  vesture,  and  that,  apart  from  all 
such  forms  and  modes  of  interpretation,  it  responds  to  an 
eternal  need  of  human  sentiment.  For  it  is  inspired  by  the 
moral  sentiments  of  humanity  and  rests  on  the  deep  founda- 
tions of  sacrifice  of  self,  devotion  to  the  kind,  the  heroism  of 
duty,  pity  for  the  poor  and  suffering,  faith  in  the  triumph  of 
good.  It  appeals  to,  and  is  the  outcome  of,  the  heart  not 
of  the  understanding,  and  so  goes  down  into  lower  depths 
than  the  fathom-line  of  the  understanding  can  sound;  for  the 
intellect  is  aristocratic  and  the  heart  democratic,  knowledge 
puffing  up  but  love  uniting  and  building  up,  and  the  true 
social  problem  is  to  democratise  the  intellect  through  the 
heart.  It  is  the  deep  fusing  feeling  of  human  solidarity,  in 
whatsoever  interpretative  doctrines  and  ceremonies  it  may  be 
organised  for  the  time,  that  is  religion  in  its  truest  sense ; 
for  it  is  in  the  social  organism  what  the  heart  is  in  the  bodily 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS   OF  EVOLUTION.  209 

organism,  and  when  it  ceases  to  beat  in  conscience,  death  and 
corruption  ensue.  The  pity  of  religious  formulas  is  that  they 
so  often  carry  men's  thoughts  away  from  the  abiding  and 
essential  reality  to  an  exaggerated  appreciation  of  the  passing 
forms  and  representations  thereof.  As  his  enemies  put  a 
false  robe  of  royalty  on  Jesus  when  they  led  him  to  death,  so 
have  his  followers  since  that  time  put  a  false  robe  of  divinity 
on  him,  and  so  done  much  to  lead  religion  to  death.  Those 
who  criticise  a  particular  religion,  were  they  wise,  would 
leave  the  sentiment  untouched  and  do  their  work  sympathe- 
tically, not  in  hostile  antipathy.  To  pour  indignation,  scorn, 
ridicule,  satire,  and  invective  upon  its  extravagances  and 
inconsistencies  is  not  the  whole  method  of  criticism,  nor 
indeed  the  best  method  in  the  end  to  accomplish  the  de- 
structive work  aimed  at. 

Another  large  reflection  springs  naturally  here  from  the 
foregoing  one — namely,  the  reflection  that  the  great  evolu- 
tional impulses  that  move  society  and  effect  great  social  revo- 
lutions do  not  spring  from  science  or  philosophy  or  know- 
ledge in  any  shape,  but  from  obscure  popular  fermentation ; 
not  from  the  clear  understanding,  which  killeth,  but  from, 
the  troubled  heart  of  mankind,  which  keepeth  alive.  It  was 
jiot  in  the  academy  nor  in  the  Lyceum,  but  in  the  manger  of 
a  stable,  that  Christianity  was  born,  and  its  earliest  adherents 
were  illiterate  and  ignorant  people  gathered  from  the  dregs 
of  the  populace.  The  masses  of  oppressed  toilers  for  a  bare 
sustenance,  sunk  in  poverty  and  worn  down  with  labour, 
what  care  they,  or  can  they  ever  care,  for  the  scientific  dis- 
coveries that  are  the  chief  glory  of  the  age  ?  If  it  takes  a 
man  all  the  labour  of  his  life,  doing  nothing  else,  to  know 
one  special  science,  it  is  evident  that  the  great  majority  of 
mankind  can  have  but  a  very  small  portion  in  any  science. 
Moreover,  knowledge  by  itself  is  not  necessarily  good ;  it  is 
power  certainly,  but  power  for  ill  as  much  as  for  good.  The 
result  of  its  increase  is  to  make  the  few  who  cultivate  and 
possess  it  more  powerful,  and  the  many  who  do  not  less 
powerful ;  to  raise  those  who  are  high  and  to  degrade  those 
who  are  low ;  to  make  the  rich  richer  and  the  poor  poorer ; 
to  increase  inequality  without  yielding  anything  to  fill  the 


210  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

intervening  gap.  Now  increase  of  inequality  means  in  the 
end  revolution  and  a  new  social  fusion,  in  any  people  that 
has  not  fallen  altogether  out  of  the  line  of  progress.  Great 
social  revolutions  are  the  antecedents  of  new  evolutions  ; 
from  the  terrible  fusion  which  they  make  of  widely  separated 
classes  and  interests  there  is  the  birth  of  new  social  forces ; 
they  prevent  the  disintegration  of  humanity  by  preserving  its 
solidarity.  A  fraternity  based  upon  knowledge  alone  would 
want  a  consolidating  cement  and  could  not  hold  together. 
It  is  worthy  of  notice  in  this  relation  that  the  great  mono-  \  j 
theistic  religions — Judaism,  Christianity,  and  Islamism — have  X, 
shown  themselves  hostile  to  science,  moved  thereto  perhaps 
by  a  deep  and  just  instinct;  for  they  represent  and  bear 
witness  to  the  prodigious  labour  and  pains,  the  tears  and  toil 
and  blood,  that  were  needed  and  have  been  spent  to  bring 
man  into  complex  social  union;  they  may  well  therefore  show 
an  apprehension  of  social  disruption  and  an  instinctive  re- 
pugnance to  that  which  in  any  wise  threatens  so  great  a  cala- 
mity. We  are  taught  by  the  Jewish  fable  which  has  become 
the  creed  of  Christendom  that  it  was  through  an  unwise  am- 
bition of  power  that  the  angels  fell,  and  through  an  unwise 
ambition  of  knowledge  that  man  fell ;  and  these  traditions 
betray  the  deep  intuition  that  it  is  not  on  knowledge,  which 
separates,  nor  on  power,  which  tyrannises,  but  on  sympathy 
of  feeling,  which  unites,  that  society  is  founded  and  built  up. 
Those  who  are  enthusiasts  enough  to  believe  in  the  re- 
generation of  society  by  the  direct  action  of  science,  and 
who  think  it  an  unmixed  good  that  the  most  earnest  intellects 
of  the  day  should  be  absorbed  in  working  out  some  of  the 
smallest  details  of  a  special  science,  would  not  do  amiss 
perhaps  to  set  to  work  to  prove  to  the  world  that  it  is  more 
moral  to  travel  at  the  rate  of  fifty  miles  an  hour  behind  a 
locomotive  than  at  the  rate  of  ten  miles  an  hour  in  a  stage- 
coach. One  effect  of  the  great  modern  progress  in  the  in- 
dustries, arts,  and  various  modes  of  material  well-being  has 
certainly  been  to  generate  many  new  desires  of  a  selfish  kind, 
the  eager  and  incontinent  gratification  of  which  is  corrupt- 
ing. Has  it  done  much  yet,  or  indeed  anything,  to  compen- 
sate for  these  egoistic  developments  ?    Nay,  has  it  not  rather 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  211 

/  weakened  tlie  great  controlling  force  of  religion  which, 
ifbrmerly  kept  egoism  in  check,  without  putting  any  altru- 

V  ^stic  force  in  its  place  ?  •  It  would  not  be  easy  to  prove  that 
it  is  an  advantage  to  accumulate  riches  if  men  decay,  to 
wear  fine  clothes  and  to  lose  fine  manners,  to  replace  quiet 
country  villages  by  miles  upon  miles  of  dreary  town-suburbs. 
Are  the  people  who  inhabit  these  monotonous  subui-bs  really 
nobler,  better,  happier  than  the  more  simple  villagers  whom 
they  have  displaced?  They  read  their  daily  newspapers  as 
they  travel  rapidly  by  railway  to  gloomy  offices  of  business, 
into  which  the  direct  light  of  day  can  hardly  penetrate,  and 
perhaps  a  journal  of  scandal  or  a  sensational  novel  in  the 
evening  when  they  have  returned  from  their  monotonous 
labours  to  their  dull  domesticities ;  but  are  they  really  better 
cultivated,  or  even  so  well  cultivated  morally,  as  their  fore- 
fathers who  walked  on  foot  to  their  work,  had  no  newspapers, 
and  read  no  more  books  than  the  Bible  and  two  or  three 
others  of  a  religious  character?  After  all,  an  act  of  heroic 
self-sacrifice  is  a  nobler  thing,  and  more  civilising,  than  to 
send  a  message  instantly  from  London  to  Hongkong. 

It  appears  then  at  the  best  doubtful,  when  we  consider 
the  matter  frankly,  whether  there  is  in  the  progress  of 
scientific  knowledge  and  of  the  arts,  industries,  and  material 
comforts  founded  on  it  the  promise  of  a  real  advance  in  true 
social  development ;  whether  in  fact  knowledge  is  not  in  this 
respect  pretty  nigh  impotent.  The  experience  of  the  ancients 
would  seem  to  indicate  as  much,  who  were  certainly  equal, 
if  not  superior,  to  us  in  architecture,  in  sculpture,  in  poetry, 
in  eloquence,  in  philosophy,  in  literature,  since  they  failed 

•  Any  one  who  looks  forward  with  a  light  heart  to  the  overthrow  of 
Christianity  might  do  well  to  consider  what  can  ever  adequately  replace  it 
^  merely  as  a  social  and  humanising  force.  Let  him  ponder  seriously  what  its 
organisation  means,  and  reflect  what  sort  of  organisation  will  be  necessary  to 
take  the  place  of  the  Church  which,  standing  in  almost  every  village  through- 
out the  land,  the  visible  token  and  the  sacred  home  of  man's  highest  aspira- 
tions, its  pavements  worn  by  the  reverent  tread  of  generations  that  now  rest 
in  hallowed  ground  around  it,  solemnly  initiates  the  individual  into  the  social 
union,  calls  him  to  regular  acknowledgment  of  his  social  duties,  admonishes 
him  of  the  vanity  of  life  and  of  the  eternal  consequences  of  the  deeds  done  in 
it,  sanctions  with  its  blessings  his  nuptial  unions,  and  speaks  solenm  words  of 
comfort  and  hope  at  the  hour  of  death. 


212  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

to  develope  out  of  these  the  forces  of  a  liiglier  social  evolu- 
tion. For  what  happened  ?  With  all  the  intellectual  acqui- 
sitions of  Rome  coming  on  the  top  of  those  of  Greece 
society  went  steadily  towards  destruction,  and  all  that 
philosophy  could  do  was  to  proclaim  and  lament  it.  Then 
was  born  of  low  parentage  in  a  most  mean  way  in  a  dis- 
tant corner  of  the  empire  a  person  who  passed  in  entire 
obscurity  thirty  years  of  a  life  which  ended  at  thirty-three 
years.  For  the  three  remaining  years  that  he  appeared  in 
public  he  was  scouted  as  a  miserable  impostor,  rejected  by 
the  priests  and  rulers  of  his  own  nation,  hardly  thought 
worthy  a  few  words  of  contemptuous  mention  by  the 
historians  of  the  day,  followed  only  by  a  few  of  the  lowest 
persons  of  the  lowest  classes  of  society.  At  the  end  of  his 
brief  public  career  he  died  an  ignominious  death  on  the 
cross,  betrayed  by  one  of  his  own  disciples,  denied  by 
another,  abandoned  by  all.^  And  yet  in  him  was  the  birth  of 
the  greatest  social  force  which,  so  far  as  we  know,  has  ever 
"arisen  to  modify  human  evolution.  To  have  predicted  it 
beforehand,  nay,  even  so  much  as  to  have  formed  the  dimnest 
anticipation  of  its  coming  and  nature,  would  have  been 
as  impossible  to  all  the  intellectual  insight  of  the  time  as  it 
would  have  been  impossible  to  predict,  before  experience, 
the  organic  molecules  which  carbon,  hydrogen,  nitrogen, 
and  oxygen  are  capable  of  forming.  The  momentous  fact 
may  well  abate  the  pretensions  of  philosophy  to  forecast  the 
future  of  humanity :  suffice  it  to  know  that  if  it  is  to  progress, 
it  will,  as  heretofore,  draw  from  a  source  within  itself,  deeper 
than  knowledge,  the  inspiration  to  direct  and  urge  it  on  the 
path  of  its  destiny. 

Continuing  the  inquiry  into  the  foundations  of  wide- 
spread traditional  beliefs  which  are  not  derived  from  obser- 
vation and  reasoning,  since  some  of  them  blankly  contradict 
observation  and  reasoning,  let  us  consider  the  doctrine  of  a 
personal  immortality.  It  was  a  natural  product  of  primitive 
imagination ;  so  much  so,  considering  how  imagination 
works,  that  it  would  have  been  a  wonder  if  it  had  not  been 

•  Enfin  il  meurt  d'une  mort  honteuse,  trahi  par  vin  des  siens,  reni6  par 
tin  autre,  et  abandonn6  de  tous. — Pascal. 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  213 

constructed  by  it  out  of  observation,  and  is  perhaps  a  wonder 
that  the  belief  is  not  universal.  Nothing  perishes  absolutely 
in  the  universe ;  matter  is  neither  created  nor  destroyed ;  it 
is  in  a  continual  flux  of  becoming  and  unbecoming,  dis- 
appearing in  one  mode  to  reappear  in  another ;  there  is  no 
death  in  the  sense  of  annihilation.  Here  then  may  have 
been  the  foundation  of  a  vague  notion  that  man  will  not  all 
die.  His  body  might  return  to  the  dust  of  which  it  was 
compounded,  going  through  a  corruption  in  the  process  that 
was  well  fitted  to  stir  an  active  repulsion  to  the  notion  of 
death,  but  it  was  not  easy  to  believe  that  all  his  high  aspira- 
tions, warm  affections,  noble  sentiments,  lofty  thoughts, 
should  lose  their  individuality  and  vanish  into  nothkigness 
with  the  loss  of  the  bodily  individuality.  For  although  time 
was  when  they  were  not,  the  difficulty  is  much  greater  to 
conceive  them  not  being  after  his  death  than  it  is  to  conceive 
them  not  being  before  he  was  born. 

It  will  be  objected  perhaps  that  a  vague  observation  of 
the  indestructibility  of  matter,  if  made — and  assuredly  it 
was  made — could  never  suffice  to  found  a  belief  of  personal 
immortality  in  face  of  the  positive  experience  that  all  living 
things  die  and  undergo  decomposition,  going  down  to  the 
earth  and  returning  not  from  it.  Bear  in  mind,  however,  in 
relation  to  this  objection,  that  many  living  things  seem  to 
die,  and  were  thought  to  die,  and  yet  do  not  die,  but  put  on 
life  again  after  a  season  of  death-like  repose.  Of  the  seed 
put  into  the  ground,  which  he  ignorantly  calls  dead,  the 
Apostle  Paul,  addressing  his  imagined  opponent  in  his  usual 
energetic  fashion,  says,  *  Thou  fool,  that  which  thou  sowest 
is  not  quickened  except  it  die : '  an  observation  incontestably 
adequate  to  generate  the  notion  of  a  resurrection,  seeing 
that  the  Apostle  actually  bases  upon  it  his  argument  of  the 
certainty  of  a  bodily  resurrection.  It  has  been  a  common 
comparison  of  the  race  of  man  on  earth  to  leaves  on  trees, 
now  green  in  youth,  now  withering  on  the  ground :  what 
more  obvious  and  natural  than  to  see  in  the  periodically 
awakened  life  of  recurring  springs  the  probability  of  a 
human  resurrection  to  life  after  a  period  of  apparent  death? 
True  it  may  be  that  the  comparison  ought  rightly  to  be  a 


214  WILL  m  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

contrast :  that,  as  tlie  Greek  poet  wails  mournfullj,  althougli 
the  mallow  and  the  green  parsley  and  the  full- thriving  anise 
come  to  life  again  and  blossom  afresh  in  the  next  summer, 
we,  whether  great  or  strong  or  wise  men,  once  we  are  buried 
in  the  earth,  sleep  a  long,  long  eternal  sleep,  from  which 
there  is  no  awaking;  but  if  it  be  so,  it  is  still  certain  that 
the  natural  tendency  and  desire  would  be,  as  I  have  pointed 
out,  to  figure  things  otherwise. 

Is  it  alleged  that  these  kinds  of  analogies  are  too  subtile 
to  have  ever  been  perceived  by  the  rude  mind  of  a  savage 
who  yet  has  some  dim  notion  of  a  life  after  his  body's  death  ? 
Be  it  so :  it  will  hardly  be  denied  then  that  the  vivid  appari- 
tion of  a  dead  person  in  dreams  would  be  enough  to  suggest 
to  the  lowest  savage,  nay  to  compel  him  to  the  belief  of,  the 
persistence  of  some  sort  of  shadowy  life  after  bodily  death. 
At  a  very  early  stage  of  human  development  such  apparitions 
of  the  dead,  in  their  forms  and  habits  as  they  lived,  could  not 
fail  to  produce  a  conviction  that  although  their  bodies  had 
perished,  the  forms  or  phantoms  of  them  survived,  lingering 
disconsolate  in  the  neighbourhood  of  their  old  habitations 
and  interests.  And  that  is  very  much  the  savage's  vague 
notion  of  a  soul,  if  he  has  any  notion  at  all;  an  image  rather 
than  an  idea,  something  more  thin,  faint  and  fine,  less  tangible, 
than  the  body ;  a  shadowy  apparition  of  the  pale,  wan  form 
of  the  dead  person,  which  was  probably  supposed  also  to 
leave  the  body  during  sleep  and  to  return  to  it  at  awaking. 
Naturally  too  he  believed  that  his  dogs  and  horses  had  simi- 
lar souls ;  for  which  reason  it  was  right  to  bury  them  with  the 
dead  chief,  along  with  his  bow  and  arrows  and  the  slaves 
perhaps  who  were  killed  to  attend  upon  him,  in  order  that 
his  ghost  might  be  fitly  furnished  and  attended  in  his  new 
sphere  of  existence.  It  is  impossible  seriously  to  compare 
this  kind  of  notion  of  spiritual  life  with  the  modern  notion 
of  soul,  or  rightly  to  call  it  by  the  same  name,  so  little  have 
they  in  common;  it  is  only  comparable  with  the  vulgar 
notion  of  a  ghost  that  prevailed  generally  at  one  time,  and 
still  prevails  among  the  ignorant,  in  civilised  countries,  or 
with  the  spirit-forms  that  are  evoked  and  exhibited  at  so- 
called  spiritual  seances.     To  discover  the  notions  of  soul  and 


^ 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  215 

God  in  the  mind  of  a  low  savage  is  very  mucli  like  an 
ingenious  discovery  of  the  steam-hammer  in  the  stone  which 
the  monkey  uses  to  crack  a  nut. 

It  is  not  in  dreams  only,  however,  that  a  vision  of  the 
dead  may  be  seen,  for  a  waking  person  shall  see  sometimes 
a  similar  apparition ;  and  it  is  a  long  time  before  a  people 
reaches  that  height  of  critical  culture  which  enables  it  to 
know  that  the  ghost  so  seen  is  a  trick  of  the  nerves,  a  hal- 
lucination of  sense.  Now  in  respect  of  such  a  vision  it  is 
plain  that  a  savage  would  be  under  a  twofold  inevitable 
drawback :  in  the  first  place,  he  could  not  have  the  least  sus- 
picion that  what  he  saw  was  a  coinage  of  his  brain,  not  an 
objective  reality,  and  must  therefore  theorise  about  it  as  a 
real  thing  of  its  kind,  though  not  of  his  kind  :  in  the  second 
place,  in  his  undeveloped  mind  with  its  few  and  child-like 
ideas  of  the  concrete  and  their  few  and  simple  associations ; 
with  that  tremulous  fear  too  of  the  unknown  common  to  him 
with  children ;  and  with  the  activity  of  an  imagination 
unballasted  by  reason,  and  prone,  as  in  children,  as  in  dream- 
ing and  in  madness,  to  make  the  concrete  notion  a  reality ; — 
the  vivid  idea  of  the  spirit  or  ghost  of  a  dead  man  would 
far  more  easily  dominate  waking  sense  and  so  give  rise  to 
hallucination,  than  it  would  in  a  mind  amply  stored  with 
abstract  notions  of  the  relations  of  the  concrete,  and  in  other 
respects  fully  developed.  Thus  he  is  at  the  same  time  more 
susceptible  to  hallucinations  and  less  capable  of  correcting 
them.  If  he  cannot  distrust  the  vivid  apparition  of  a  dream, 
how  can  he  distrust  the  vivid  and  more  startling  apparition 
of  waking  life  ?  We  may  feel  the  less  averse  to  accept  this 
theory  of  the  origin  of  a  belief  in  ghost-like  apparitions  of 
the  dead  among  savages,  if  we  consider  well  how  large  a  part 
beliefs  in  invisible  spirits  that  sometimes  become  visible 
have  had  in  the  beliefs  of  civilised  nations,  and  how  much  the 
hallucinations  of  fanatical  enthusiasm  have  helped  in  the 
propagation  of  religious  creeds. 

Another  important  fact  which  we  ought  clearly  to  appre- 
hend and  fully  to  comprehend :  that  although  the  man  dies 
humanity  does  not  die,  the  death  of  the  individual  being  a 
necessary  event  of  the  life  of  the  race.     He,  though  dead,  is 


216  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

still  a  part  of  living  Immanity,  a  coefficient  in  its  movements, 
in  so  far  as  what  he  has  done  contributes  to  its  weal  or  to 
its  woe :  in  the  influence  which  he  has  exerted  through  his 
deeds  and  through  the  children  whom  he  has  perhaps  brought 
into  being,  the  good  or  ill  that  he  has  done  lives  after  him. 
The  deadest  of  deaths  is  never  a  complete  death.  As  he 
cannot  stand  alone  in  life,  separate  and  self-sufficing,  but  as 
one  in  a  company,  a  unit  of  society,  must  needs  give  and 
take,  becoming  debtor  and  creditor  before  he  is  aware  of  it, 
so  death  does  not  isolate  and  end  him ;  for  as  none  liveth  to 
himself  so  none  dieth  to  himself,  and  those  who  follow  him 
suffer  or  gain  inevitably  by  what  he  has  done  to  help  or  to 
hinder  the  progress  of  his  kind.  Those  especially  with 
whom  he  has  lived  in  intimate  intercourse,  who  have  been 
witnesses  of  his  struggles  and  shared  in  his  interests,  who 
have  sympathised  with  him  in  his  failures  and  rejoiced  with 
him  in  his  successes,  in  whose  thoughts  and  feelings  he  has 
filled  a  large  place  and  of  whose  being  he  has  been  a  great 
part,  cannot  be  entirely  rid  of  him  when  he  dies ;  for  he  has 
entered  as  an  element  into  their  mental  nature  and  habits, 
and  he  lives  on  there  after  his  death,  it  may  be  in  a  con- 
tinuing and  even  multiplying  increase  from  generation  to 
generation.  Is  it  not  soberly  true  of  a  great  benefactor  of 
mankind  that  he  has  a  larger  and  fuller  human  life  after 
death  than  he  had  when  he  actually  lived?  Putting  off 
mortality  he  puts  on  immortality.  If  then  your  dead 
mother,  or  sister,  or  lover,  or  child  has  such  a  continuing  life 
in  you,  it  may  well  be  for  you  a  hard  and  repugnant,  perhaps 
an  impossible,  thing  to  conceive  him  or  her  as  having  under- 
gone the  death  of  annihilation.  For  how  can  he  be  annihi- 
lated who,  being  a  part  of  your  happiest  memories,  is  still 
living  in  you  ?  He  is  not  annihilated  for  you  until  you  are 
annihilated ;  and  indeed  not  then  so  long  as  your  influence 
lives  on  in  those  who  come  after  you.  Naturally  it  is  a  much 
easier  matter,  indeed  a  matter  nowise  difficult,  for  you  to 
suppose  that  a  rickety  Chinese  baby  which  drew  only  a 
few  gasps  of  breath  some  three  thousand  years  ago  is  not 
now  enjoying  eternal  life,  or  to  imagine  the  eternal  death  of 
a  Choctaw  Indian's  worn-out  squaw  who  died  a  thousand 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  217 

years  before  Columbus  discovered  America.  It  is  not  here 
alleged,  be  it  understood,  that  the  belief  in  a  personal  im- 
mortality sprang  from  a  clear  conception  of  this  continuing 
life  in  others  :  all  that  is  supposed  is  that  the  strong  instinct 
thereof  which  experience  could  not  fail  to  infix  would  stimu- 
late the  imaofination  to  clothe  it  in  some  ideal  form.  Rather 
would  it  seem  that  the  clear  conception  belongs  to  the 
future,  being  that  into  which  the  prevailing  belief  of  a 
spiritual  individuality  after  death  is  likely  with  the  advance 
of  knowledge  to  merge  :  a  life  in  very  truth  spiritual  since 
it  is  in  the  spirits  of  them  that  bear  witness  to  it  that  it 
lives. 

Lastly,  consider  this :  that  when  the  drama  of  life  ends 
prematurely  by  a  tragical  close — that  is,  when  the  individual 
is  cut  off  suddenly  in  the  budding  spring  or  full  summer  of 
his  energy,  before  his  desire  to  do  and  be  is  waning  or 
extinct,  there  is  an  earnest  longing  to  do  more,  a  fearful 
aversion  to  realise  that  it  is  the  end,  an  instinctive  craving 
for  the  continuance  of  a  life  not  yet  fully  spent,  which  trans- 
lates itself  easily  into  the  belief  of  a  life  to  come.  Hence  it 
is  that  the  desire  and  belief  of  a  future  life  are  stronger 
and  more  manifest  in  those  who  die  young  or  in  middle  age, 
especially  if  from  accident  or  from  sudden  disease,  than  in 
old  persons  who  die  of  wasting  disease  or  by  the  slow  process 
of  natural  decay ;  for  in  these  the  waning  of  vital  energy  is 
^ffie  waning  of  the  desire  to  live ;  and  though  they  may  hold 
to  and  repeat  the  formulas  of  their  creed,  they  do  it  in  a 
quiet,  formal,  automatic  way,  very  much  as  they  continue 
methodically  the  habits  of  their  lives  or  perform  their 
customary  slow  and  measured  movements.  Worn  out  at  last^ 
by  the  infirmities  of  age,  the  one  thing  they  heartily  desire 
is  freedom  from  disturbance — rest.  Not  only  by  the  indi- 
vidual who  perishes  timelessly,  but  by  those  near  and  dear 
to  him,  is  the  natural  unwillingness  felt  to  believe  that  so 
premature  an  end  can  be  the  end;  for  when  death  has 
snatched  suddenly  away  one  who  had  just  begun  to  love  and 
be  loved,  whose  wisdom  was  but  half  blossomed,  his  work 
not  yet  half  done,  it  seems  to  them  impossible  to  acknow- 
ledge that  he  was  created  only  for  such  an  abortive  result ; 
15 


218  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

thej  are  constrained  to  hope  that  the  fair  promise  of  de- 
velopment, blasted  here,  will  have  fulfilment  elsewhere. 

Is  the  longing  for  immortality  then  essentially  the  sub- 
lime utterance  of  human  egoism,  and  the  expression  of  it 
perhaps  the  statement  in  terms  of  extension — that  is,  as 
eternal,  of  the  intensity  of  the  feeling  of  life-love  which  is 
not  otherwise  adequately  expressible  ?  'Tis  much,  in  fact,  as, 
according  to  Coleridge's  apt  remark,  two  ardent  lovers  try 
to  express  the  intensity  of  their  love  by  describing  themselves 
as  '  Yours  for  ever.*  How  indeed  can  the  sense  of  heiyig  feel, 
or  the  notion  of  being  adequately  conceive,  the  sense  or 
notion  of  not-being?  From  the  subjective  basis  alone  it 
would  seem  impossible  that  I,  being,  can  conceive  myself  as 
not  being ;  to  do  so  would  be  to  be  and  not  to  be  at  the  same 
moment;  wherefore  from  that  standpoint  the  intensity  of 
the  feeling  of  life  becomes  naturally  the  extensive  hope  or 
belief  of  an  eternal  life  after  a  seeming  death.  But  the 
matter  has  quite  another  look  when  one  has  recourse  to 
objective  observation;  for  there  is  no  great  difficulty,  as  I 
have  said  before,  in  conceiving  the  eternal  death  of  a  baby 
that  lived  only  a  few  minutes  in  an  Indian  wigwam  ten 
thousand  years  ago.  In  like  manner  one  may  attend  in 
imagination  at  the  destruction  of  one's  own  body  as  it 
undergoes  corruption  in  the  grave,  organ  after  organ  in  due 
course  according  to  the  tenacity  of  its  structure,  until  it 
mixes  indistinguishably  with  the  surrounding  soil.  Is  it 
then  that  a  subjective  illusion  of  ever-being  requires,  like 
other  subjective  feelings,  to  be  corrected  by  objective  obser- 
vation? The  true  measure  of  time  is  not  the  feeling  of 
duration  but  the  watch,  the  true  measure  of  temperature 
the  thermometer.  Here  again  may  we  take  instructive 
note  what  good  reason  theology  has  for  its  instinctive  anta- 
gonism to  science  and  for  its  inseverable  adhesion  to  meta-  ]x 
physics. 

Is  it  true,  as  we  are  taught,  that  we  have  the  instinct  we 
are  strangers  and  sojourners  here,  and  belong  permanently  to 
another  kingdom  than  the  passing  kingdom  of  this  world? 
It  is  not  true  that  the  instinct  is  uaiversal,  but  it  is  certainly 
true  that  we  have  here  no  abiding  place,  and  that  we  and 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  219 

tLe  changing  fashions  of  this  world  shall  pass  away.  How 
can  it  be  otherwise,  since  this  world  being  the  world  that 
each  one's  senses  fashion  for  him  must  be  as  transient  as 
they  are?  It  is  the  internal  synthesis  which  he  makes  of 
the  infinitesimally  small  fraction  of  the  whole  to  the  mole- 
cular vibrations  of  which  he  is  sensible.  When  the  functions 
of  sense  cease  at  death,  and  the  mental  organisation  that 
_they  have  built  up  undergoes  dissolution  with  the  rest  of  the 
bodily  parts,  these  become  again  a  part  of  the  whole  out  of 
which  it  came  into  temporary  being,  entering  into  and  re- 
suming their  rights  in  those  cosmical  operations  whose  range 
is  outside  the  sense-built  world  of  human  experience.  From 
the  standpoint  of  the  individual  the  world  was  not  before 
he  was  and  will  not  be  after  he  is  not. 

This  we  may  say  at  the  end  of  these  reflections  concerning 
the  natural  modes  of  origin  of  a  belief  of  personal  immortality 
— and  there  is  perhaps  little  more  to  be  said — that  the  various 
imaginative  constructions  which  different  systems  of  religion" 
have  built  up  respectively  to  give  the  mind  the  stay  and  satis-" 
faction  of  positive  conceptions  in  that  wherein  its  nature  and 
the  nature  of  things  deny  them,  useful  and  essential  as  they 
have  been  in  the  process  of  human  development,  may  not  on 
^that  account  have  any  more  basis  in  the  fully  developed  in- 
tellectual life  of  mankind  than  an  embryonic  organ  of  the 
body,  the  functions  of  which  cease  soon  after  birth,  has  in 
the  bodily  life  of  the  adult  individual.  When  men  do  not 
know  the  truth  they  do  well  to  agree  in  common  error 
based  upon  common  feeling,  for  thereby  their  energies  are 
fixed  in  the  unity  of  definite  aim  and  not  dissipated  to  waste 
.  in  restless  and  incoherent  vagaries.      No  doubt  the  provi- 

f  "Clonal  belief  may  be  in  many  respects  harmful,  as  the  belief 
in  immortality  would  certainly  seem  to  have  been ;  for  it  has 
been  the  direct  cause  of  numberless  sacrifices  of  animals,  of 
slaves,  of  women,  on  the  tombs  of  men;  the  occasion  of  a 

y  "complete  machinery  of  extortions  by  priests  to  have  masses 
said  for  the  souls  of  the  dead,  or  to  obtain  their  interces- 
sions; has  too  often  dimmed  the  hope  and  weighed  down  the 
energy  of  this  life  by  the  overhanging  dread  of  an  eternity 
of  suffering;  has  lessened  generally  the  sense  of  the  value 


220  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

and  weakened  the  conscience  of  human  life  on  earth,  by  pre- 
cluding the  just  feeling  of  present  responsibility  for  the  end- 
less consequences  of  every  act  done  in  it;  and  has  entailed 
several  other  ills  that  might  be  mentioned.  But  these  ills 
may  be  deemed  the  compensating  offsets  of  a  preponderating 
good,  so  long  as  the  belief  has  genuine  vitality.  To  idealise 
the  real,  and  thereafter  to  present  the  ideal  in  concrete 
notion  or  sensible  form  and  to  pretend  it  is  the  real — 
that  is  the  law  of  the  nisus  of  man's  mental  evolution,  the 
pleasing  means  by  which  he  is  duped  into  development. 

Passing  from  these  reflections,  though  they  might  easily 
be  continued  to  a  much  greater  length,  I  now  advert  briefly 
to  two  more  religious  beliefs  that  are  of  transcendent  mag- 
nitude. The  first  is  that  of  the^tonement.  How  came  it 
to  pass  that  men  ever  conceived  naturally  the  notion  of  the 
redemption  of  the  whole  human  race  by  the  sacrifice  of  one 
person  through  a  painful  and  ignominious  death  ?  Develop- 
ment they  could  perceive  plainly  in  nature,  and  degeneration 
they  could  perceive ;  but  how  conceive  the  notion  that  a  great 
vicarious  sacrifice  of  God  incarnate  as  man  was  required  and 
made  in  order  that  God  might  fulfil  His  purpose  of  increasing 
development  and  lessening  degeneration?  It  will  be  said, 
perhaps,  that  the  stupendous  strangeness  and  uniqueness  of 
the  conception  were  the  natural  consequence  of  the  fact  that 
it  did  not  and  could  not  come  naturally,  but  did  come  super- 
naturally ;  that  its  natural  improbability  was  just  what 
might  be  expected  from  its  natural  impossibihty.  Is  the 
notion  then  so  extraordinary,  so  independent,  and  so  unre- 
lated, so  entirely  a  thing-of-itself,  that  it  must  have  come 
by  special  message  from  supernatural  sources  to  a  select 
fraction  of  the  human  race?  or  may  it  not  have  come  as  the 
culminating  development  of  other  notions  of  the  same  kind, 
but  of  lesser  magnitude,  that  have  prevailed  in  divers  forms 
among  all  fractions  of  the  race  ?  There  cannot  be  a  doubt 
that  the  rite  of  sacrifice  by  which  guilt  was  expiated  or  bless- 
/~ings  gained  was  one  of  the  most  remarkable  and  constant 
observances  of  different  religions;  and  it  is  not  therefore  any 
violation  of  probability,  nor  any  violence  of  legitimate  scien- 
tific inference,  to  suppose  that  the  supreme  sacrifice  of  the 


CEETAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS  Of  EVOLUTION.  221 


/ 


only  Son  of  God  was  tlie  grand  climax  of  this  notion  of 
vicarious  atonement.  For  naturally  in  sucLi  sacrifices  it  was 
best  that  the  victim  should  be  as  rare  and  spotless  as  possible, 
the  value  and  efficacy  of  the  sacrifice  increasing  with  the 
purity  and  rarity  of  the  thing  offered.  Now  certainly  there 
could  not  be  a  more  rare,  more  pure,  more  costly  sacrifice 
than  that  of  the  only-begotten  and  well-beloved  Son  of  God. 
Abraham's  designed  sacrifice  of  his  son  Isaac,  Jephthah's 
sacrifice  of  his  daughter,  Agamemnon's  sacrifice  of  Iphigenia, 
and  the  like  instances :  what  more  probable  stepping 
stones  to  the  stupendous  notion  of  that  supreme  vicarious 
sacrifice  for  the  whole  human  race?  Plainly  evolution  in 
that  direction  has  come  to  an  end  now ;  it  has  reached  a 
matchless  height  in  the  climax  of  the  conception  of  sacrifice, 
and  cannot  ever  go  a  step  further ;  and  any  change  in  time 
to  come  must  be  the  undoing  change  of  dissolution. 

It  is  not  perhaps  hard  to  understand  how  the  notion  of 
vicarious  sacrifice,  once  it  had  come  to  be,  reached  its 
supreme  evolution.  But  what  is  not  so  evident  is  how  the 
original  idea  came  into  being.  Most  likely  from  the  wish  to 
placate  by  suitable  offerings — the  more  costly  and  precious 
the  more  acceptable^;the_terrible  gods  and  other  mysterious 
__powers  with  which  primitive  imagination  peopled  nature, 
jind  in  particular  the  special  guardian  spirit  or  God  of  the 
family,  the  city,  the  tribe.  Man  approached  his  gods  as 
he  would  have  approached  an  earthly  tyrant  whose  favour 
he  desired  to  win  or  whose  anger  he  hoped  to  propitiate, 
Ijj  humbly  presenting  to  them  offerings  of  that  which 
was  most  precious  to  him,  or  what  custom  ordained  as  by 
them  most  esteemed.  If  he  had  not  or  could  not  obtain  that 
\A'hich  he  desired  to  offer,  as  being  too  costly  or  not  in  the 
nature  of  things  procurable,  he  substituted  in  lieu  of  it  some 
other  offering  to  please  the  propitious  or  to  appease  the 
incensed  Deity. 

This  fact  also  we  ought  to  apprehend  and  consider  well 
— that  vicarious  sacrifice  is  implicit  in  the  constitution  of 
society;  the  very  structure  of  which  is  based  upon  the 
principle  that  we  suffer  for  one  another's  sins,  bear  one 
another's  burdens,  expiate  one  another's  errors,  profit  by 


222  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOaiCAL  ASPECTT. 

one  another's  gains,  gain  by  one  another's  pains.'  It  is  an 
immanent  law  of  the  constitution  and  development  of  the 
"social  organism,  and  very  manifest  in  its  elemental  factor  or 
unit — the  family :  the  solidarity  of  mankind  in  social  union 
the  basis  of  it.  Children  suffer  the  bitter  pains  of  their 
parents'  wrong-doings,  who  themselves  go  through  many 
labours  and  sorrows  in  order  that  their  children  may  have 
joy  and  gladness ;  the  wife  is  the  innocent  victim  of  her 
husband's  sins  and  reaps  the  fruits  of  his  painful  toils,  as 
he  in  turn  suffers  the  penalty  of  her  failings  and  profits  by 
her  virtues — each  benefiting  by  the  pains  and  gains  of  the 
other ;  the  idle,  reckless  and  improvident  live  on  the  fruits 
of  the  labour  of  the  industrious,  prudent -and  provident;  the 
greatest  benefactors  of  mankind  have  often  been  the  greatest 
sufferers  at  its  hands — have  died  some  of  them  publicly  as 
known,  many  of  them  in  obscurity  as  unknown,  martyrs  of 
humanity.  Without  doubt  all  guilt  is  avenged  upon  earth, 
but  never  wholly,  and  sometimes  hardly  at  all,  upon  the 
individual  sinner.  Everywhere  the  same  story  meets  us  : 
that  vicarious  atonement  and  vicarious  recompense  are 
essential  principles  of  social  union.  To  forgive  one's 
enemies  and  to  do  good  to  them  that  use  us  ill  should  not 
be,  as  it  commonly  is,  the  hardest  task  of  Christian  humility, 
or  the  highest  reach  of  philosophic  indifference,  but  the  easy 
and  natural  result  of  a  just  and  adequate  view  of  one's  social 
debtor  and  creditor  relations.  If  now  this  principle  of 
vicarious  suffering  was  implicit  in  the  earliest  social  de- 
velopment, and  the  necessary  condition  of  that  development, 
is  it  any  wonder  that  some  faint  and  vague  adumbration  of 
it,  some  dim  intuition  of  its  meaning,  should  have  been  re- 
vealed to  the  minds  of  the  early  leaders  in  the  social  move- 
ment, and  inspired  and  initiated  those  rites  of  sacrifice  that 
have  been  such  marked  features  in  many  religions  ?  To  say 
that  a  divinely  endowed  being  was  sent  into  the  world  to 
make  atonement  for  mankind  by  suffering  the  penalty  of  its 
sins,  and  so  to  redeem  it  from  a  fate  of  unending  misery,  is 
to  say  that  nature  developed  the  means  by  which  nature  was 
made  better:  in  other  words,  the  organism  of  humanity, 
having  reached  a  certain  stage  of  evolution,  gave  birth  to  a 
'  See  Cardinal  Newman's  Grammar  of  Assent. 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  223 

supremely  endowed  organ  by  tlie  functions  of  which,  its 
future  development  was  determined  in  the  right  direction — in 
the  direction,  that  is  to  say,  of  that  moral  which  is  true  social 
progress.  The  supreme  atonement  was  the  personification 
and  glorification  of  the  social  principle  of  vicarious  sacrifice. 
That  is  seen  to  be  the  true  meaning  of  it  when  we  look 
sincerely  at  facts,  and  do  not  leave  the  solid  ground  of  their 
relations  to  busy  and  beguile  ourselves  with  discussions  in 
the  air  concerning  a  unique,  entirely  detached,  and  trans- 
cendently  mysterious  event. 

The  other  widespread  religious,  or  rather  theological, 
belief  to  which  I  advert  briefly  is  that  of  a  personal  God. 
In  the  order  of  development  the  belief  in  many  gods  pre- 
ceded the  belief  in  one  God.  Ignorant  and  comparatively 
helpless  as  primeval  man  was,  as  he  stumbled  blindly  along 
in  his  career,  aNvestruck  with  vague  and  vast  terror  of  the 
encompassing  unknown  in  relation  to  which  he  could  not 
make  definite  adjustments  of  conduct  nor  frame  distinct 
apprehensions  of  feeling  and  thought,  his  imagination  gave 
anthropomorphic  personifications  to  the  vast  and  mysterious 
powers  whose  laws  of  action  he  did  not  in  the  least  under- 
stand. Knowing  nothing  of  forces  that  overwhelmed  him, 
and  yet  obliged  every  moment  to  act  in  relation  to  them,  he 
was  continually  ofiending  against  them  and  sufiering  for  his 
offences.  The  aspect  therefore  in  which  they  were  presented 
to  him  was  that  of  angry  and  terrible  powers,  evil-inflicting, 
hidden,  all-powerful,  before  which  he  prostrated  himself  in 
abject  fear  and  abasement,  eager  to  appease  their  wrath  and 
to  win  their  favour  by  supplications  and  sacrifices.  All 
which  was  natural  enough :  how  could  he  account  for  their 
mysterious  and  seemingly  malignant  workings,  how  represent 
them  to  his  intelligence,  except  by  imagining,  from  the  basis 
of  his  own  experience,  hidden  beings  who  acted  from  like 
vengeful  motives  to  those  which  actuated  him  and  his  fellows, 
only  with  vastly  greater  power?  The  generalisation  war- 
ranted by  his  observation  and  experience,  so  far  as  he  could 
make  it,  would  be  the  generalisation  of  almighty  malignity. 

It  was  no  less  natural  that  fear  abated  as  knowledge  grew 
by  slow  and  minute  increments  through  the  ages,  as  more 
and  more  the  discovery  was  made  of  natural  laws  uniform 


224  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT, 

in  tlieir  operations,  and  as  more  and  more  clearly  lie  perceived 
he  could  by  conforming  to  those  laws  turn  them  to  his  profit, 
gaining  victory  after  victory  through  obedience ;  that  god 
after  god  receded  further  and  further  into  the  background, 
waning  in  power  and  consideration  as  new  provinces  of  know- 
ledge were  conquered  successively,  and  finally  expired ;  that 
the  personal  action  of  those  gods  which  were  left  became  more 
and  more  remote,  obscure,  and  indirect ;  and  that  at  last  he 
was  brought  to  the  recognition  of  one  God,  Maker  of  heaven 
and  earth,  who  ordained  and  governed  all  things  by  laws 
which  were  the  manifestations  of  His  will.  The  necessities 
of  thought  compelled  him  to  posit  somewhere  at  the  back 
of  known  causation,  at  the  beginning,  that  is  to  say, 
of  the  series  of  causes  upon  causes  which  he  could  trace 
backwards  in  endless  regress,  a  self-existing  cause — God, 
substance,  nature — to  which  no  antecedent  cause  was  con- 
ceivable. I^ow  this  great  conception  of  one  God  absorbing 
into  Himself  all  other  gods,  and  leaving  them  no  continuity 
of  being  but  in  Him,  is  plainly  the  last  term,  'the  consum- 
mate flower,'  of  god-fashioning  evolution ;  there  can  be  no 
farther  progress  henceforth  in  that  direction ;  a  final  con- 
ception has  been  reached  beyond  which  it  is  impossible  for 
human  thought  to  go. 

Always  has  it  been  necessary  for  man  to  make  for  him- 
self some  sort  of  mental  synthesis  of  the  world  around  him 
in  order  to  live  in  it.  He  must  bind  phenomena  into  a  unity 
of  some  kind ;  otherwise  he  would  be  the  play  of  scattered 
and  unconnected  impressions  succeeding  one  another  with- 
out any  tie,  would  have  no  sense  of  continuity,  and  could  not 
so  much  as  look  out  on  it  intelligently  or  act  methodically 
in  relation  to  it :  moral  and  intellectual  development  would 
be  impossible.  The  unifying  impulse  is  indeed  instinct  in 
living  matter  both  in  its  conscious  and  its  unconscious  rela- 
tions :  it  is  the  base  of  the  so-called  principle  of  individuation 
which  has  been  defined  as  the  essential  characteristic  of  life. 
For  the  body  is  a  synthesis,  each  organ  of  it  a  synthesis, 
each  element  of  each  organ  a  synthesis  :  organic  life  is  kept  up 
by  the  maintenance  and  organic  growth  by  the  increase  of  a 
synthesis.     Life  in  mind  in  like  manner  is  not  possible  save 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS   OF  EVOLUTION.  225 

bj  virtue  of  a  unifying  impulse  that  is  itself  the  necessary 
expression  of  bodily  unity  or  synthesis.  How  then  must  it 
necessarily  manifest  itself  in  relation  to  external  nature  at 
a  time  when,  ignorance  of  matter  and  its  properties  and 
relations  being  almost  complete,  no  approach  to  a  scientific 
synthesis  was  possible?  By  the  imaginative  construction 
of  agents  dwelling  and  working  in  nature — that  is  to  say, 
by  the  fabrication  of  demons  and  deities  ;  to  be  followed  at 
a  later  period  of  the  advance  of  knowledge,  when  demoi.s 
and  deities  fell  into  discredit,  by  the  creation  of  meta- 
physical entities  dwelling  in  things,  which  took  upon  them 
the  functions  of  the  extinct  gods.  Always,  however,  is  syn- 
thesis of  feeling  deeper  than  intellectual  synthesis :  a  man 
may  have  no  very  definite  and  consistent  theory  in  the 
conduct  of  his  life,  but  none  the  less  will  his  mental  con- 
struction of  the  world  follow  consistently  an  unconscious 
synthesis  springing  from  feeling  and  character ;  so  likewise 
in  primitive  man  the  synthesis  of  feeling  was  prior  to  that 
of  thought,  and  inspired  his  grotesquely  imaginative  inter- 
pretations of  nature,  as  it  inspires  now  the  particular  mental 
theory  of  the  world  which  each  individual  constructs  for 
himself.  Consider  the  matter  well,  without  flinching  from 
the  logical  issues  of  reflection,  and  is  it  not  the  fact  that  the 
unity  of  a  science,  which  so  much  delights  its  pursuers  now ; 
that  each  scientific  synthesis  in  it  which  the  pleased  and 
patient  worker  contributes  to  build  up  the  whole ;  that  the 
grand  conception  of  the  unity  of  all  science,  which  kindles 
flaming  outbursts  of  philosophic  rapture ;  are  just  as  much 
subjective  creations  on  our  part,  mere  modes  of  our  know- 
ledge, as  ever  were  demons  and  deities,  and  for  aught  we 
know  may  have  little  more  valid  foundation  in  objective 
reality  ? 

The  idea  of  God,  as  giving  unity  to  the  universe,  or  of 
self-subsisting  Substance — Sinatura  naturans — which  is  tacitly 
endowed  with  the  attributes  of  God,  is  a  necessity  of  thought 
imposed  upon  man  by  the  limitations  of  his  faculties — by 
the  impossibility  under  which  he,  as  an  individual,  lies  of 
thinking  and  interpreting  the  universe  save  in  terms  of 
himself.       Unavoidably  and   unwarrantably   he   limits   the 


226  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

unknown  power  wliicli  lie  calls  God,  when  he  honestly  tries 
to  make  the  conception  of  it,  though  he  starts  in  instant 
afiright  from  the  limitation  which  he  suspects  he  is  making, 
when  he  catches  a  glimpse  of  it ;  and  by  inventing  words  that 
negate  definite  meanings,  in  order  to  conceal  or  deny  it,  he 
pleases  himself  to  think  that  he  has  got  rid  of  it  in  thought. 
To  attempt  to  comprehend  or  even  to  name  the  inscrutable 
is  the  grossest  absurdity :  the  incomprehensible  must  remain 
ineffable.  Nevertheless  he  may  be  permitted  to  believe 
that  energy  from  the  region  outside  knowledge  works  in 
and  by  him,  giving  impulses  and  aspirations  which  he  can- 
not otherwise  account  for ;  he  may  feel  the  energy  without 
being  able  to  fathom  its  source,  as  a  man  would  feel  the 
moon  in  the  tides,  though  he  were  blind  and  never  saw  it ; 
and  he  may  declare  his  impotence  of  thought  by  such  ex- 
pressions as  from  everlasting  to  everlasting,  infinite,  absolute, 
and  the  like.  But  to  bring  God  at  all  within  the  compass 
of  human  predication,  and  above  all  to  give  to  Him  a  magni- 
fied human  personality,  a  character  and  a  name,  asserting 
thereupon  that  man  is  made  in  His  image,  is  sheer 
blasphemy  and  nonsense.  The  Jehovah  of  the  Jew  was  as 
purely  tribal  a  God  as  any  god  of  the  Canaanites  over  whom 
He  exulted ;  as  plain  a  creation  of  the  Jewish  mind  and 
character  as  the  idols  of  the  Chinese  are  national  creations, 
which  they  are  said  to  make  -with  big  bellies  because  the 
ruling  functionaries  are  usually  corpulent  in  that  respect. 
Nor  in  any  other  case  can  assertions  made  concerning  God 
fail  to  do  more  than  reflect  the  stages  of  human  culture  at 
vyhich  they  are  made ;  even  to  declare  His  ways  to  be  what  we 
call  moral  is  just  as  absurd  as  to  declare  Him  to  be  jealous, 
angry,  revengeful,  or  to  have  back  parts.'  The  most  exalted 
idea  that  can  be  formed  is  still  anthropomorphic,  being 
nothing  else  than  the  most  abstract  ideal  of  humanity  con- 

'  The  man  who  does  to  others  as  he  would  have  others  do  unto  him,  is 
moral ;  but  it  is  a  morality  from  a  strictly  human  standpoint.  What  might 
the  animal  which  he  pursues,  enslaves,  tortures,  kills,  eats  for  his  gratifica- 
tion, think  of  that  morality  from  its  standpoint  ?  Or,  how  may  such 
morality  look  from  the  standpoint  of  the  universe  as  a  whole  ?  Let  us  join 
hands  and  help  one  another,  for  we  are  the  glory  of  the  universe,  if  not  its  end 
and  aim,  and  nothing  else  has  any  value  in  it  in  comparison  with  us  ! 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  227 

ceivable  with  as  many  relations  as  possible  got  rid  of — in 
fact  with  certain  attached  words  that  are  actually  negations 
of  conceptions,  but  which  are  tacitly  treated  as  meaning 
realities. 

These  we  may  set  down  as  the  two  supreme  absurdities  : 
first,  the  assertion  that  there  is  nothing  beyond  human 
experience  that  is  not  in  accordance  with  human  experi- 
ence, nothing  beyond  the  actual  or  possible  reach  of  human 
faculties ;  and,  secondly,  the  pretence  to  any  sort  of  know- 
ledge of  that  beyond  or  the  enunciation  of  any  proposition 
whatever,  positive  or  negative,  concerning  it.  Every  one 
has  justly  the  right  to  rebel  alike  against  the  dogmatism 
of  sense-built  science  when  it  goes  beyond  its  range  to  deny 
supra-sensual  possibilities,  and  against  the  dogmatism  of  the 
theologian  who  imposes  his  fantastic  notions  of  the  supra- 
sensual  as  matters  of  faith. 

It  is  certain  that  the  conception  of  God  at  the  present 
day,  as  a  God  of  love  to  the  whole  human  race,  is  very 
different  from  the  Jewish  conception  of  God,  this  having 
undergone  a  remarkable  evolution  in  Christian  thought. 
Faith  has  created  the  pattern  that  love  desires ;  and  the 
jealous  and  special  God  of  the  Jews,  nominally  worshipped 
still,  is  really  banished  to  the  limbo  where  other  dead  gods, 
like  Jupiter,  Saturn,  Neptune,  and  the  rest  of  them,  have 
gone. 

The  tendency  moreover  is  day  by  day  more  and  more  to 
abandon  predications  concerning  God  and  to  make  the  con- 
ception more  and  more  abstract,  vague,  remote,  undefined, 
nebulous.  How  in  any  way  define,  that  is  mark  out  from 
all  else,  when  there  is  no  else  ?  An  eminent  Unitarian 
preacher  and  writer,  after  congratulating  himself  on  the 
dissolution  or  fading  away  of  what  he  calls  '  scenic  dreams  ' 
of  the  Christ-drama,  says  that  'the  more  the  Divine  life 
awakes  in  us  the  less  do  we  ask,  and  the  less  can  we  bear, 
that  its  infinite  objects  and  elements  shall  be  rendered 
finite  by  being  brought  into  the  plane  of  Perception.'  ^  He 
would  have  a  vague  and  vast  feeling  of  transcendental 
possession,  not  to  be  apprehended  in  thought  nor  uttered  in 

•  Rev.  Dr.  Martineau. 


228  WILL  m  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

words,  such  as  he  might  get,  I  take  it,  without  any  divine 
contemplation  at  all,  from  a  dose  of  opium ;  or  such  as  a 
hysterical  girl  who  falls  into  an  ecstasy  has  engendered 
by  the  practice  of  self-abandonment  to  unwisely  indulged 
feeling.  For  he  omits  to  inquire  into  the  source,  which 
may  be  the  lowest  bodily,  and  into  the  value,  which  may 
be  personal  and  illusive,  of  this  vaguely  rapturous  feeling  by 
which  he  aspires  to  be  possessed  and  thrilled ;  and  he  would 
do  well  perhaps,  first,  to  assure  himself  that  the  afflatus  is 
from  above  and  not  from  below,  and  then  to  prove  that  in 
any  case  it  is  a  wholesome  and  efficacious  substitute  for  the 
concrete  Divinity  which  he  has  denuded  Christ  of.  It  may 
be  doubted  whether  by  taking  the  God  out  of  Christ,  and 
then  getting  up  an  ecstasy  of  vapid  sentiment  about  a 
Divinity  from  which  man  has  been  eliminated,  there  is  scope 
left  for  sound  and  manly  feeling ;  for  with  emotion  as  with 
thought  the  true  test  of  practical  value  is  perhaps  to  be 
sought  in  the  concrete.  Otherwise  one  may  arrive  at  a  mood 
of  mind  in  which  shall  be  found  much  comfort  and  no  shock 
to  reason  in  a  prayer  of  this  kind : — 0  Thou,  who  wast  before 
every  before,  and  wilt  be  after  every  after;  most  hidden, 
yet  most  present;  unchangeable,  yet  all-changing;  never 
new,  never  old ;  ever  working,  ever  at  rest ;  still  gathering, 
yet  nothing  lacking;  who  lovest  without  passion;  art 
jealous  without  anxiety ;  repentest,  yet  grievest  not ;  art 
angry,  yet  serene  ; ' — and  so  forth  through  an  assortment  of 
blank  contradictories  that  are  revealed  to  the  divine  intui- 
tion of  ecstatic  feeling  as  blended  in  mj^stical  union  in  a 
higher  plane  of  being  than  thought  can  reach  or  aspire  to. 

Some  there  are  who  will  be  disposed  to  contend  for  some- 
thing of  a  human  character  in  the  divine  consciousness  on 
the  ground  that  in  its  contents  are  the  infinite  multitudes  of 
separate  human  consciousnesses  :  the  grand  harmonic  whole 
must  be  conscious  because  it  embraces  the  multitudinous 
undulations  that  are  conscious.  In  respect  of  that  argument 
it  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  sum  of  any  number  of 
limitations,  such  as  all  individual  consciousnesses  being  rela- 
tive are,  never  could  make  the  unlimited.  Let  them  all  be 
'  Most  of  these  expressions  are  taken  from  St.  Augustine's  Con/eisiotts. 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  229 

included,  the  resultant  is  still  limited,  and  that  which  is  still 
excluded  is  the  infinite;  of  which  to  predicate  the  same 
kind  of  consciousness  is  nonsense.  We  are  thus  brought  to 
the  dilemma  either  to  make  divine  consciousness  co-extensive 
onlj  with  a  small  part  of  the  universe,  namely,  that  which 
is  humanly  conscious,  or  to  extend  human  consciousness  to 
the  whole,  when  it  could  obviously  be  no  longer  human.  In 
the  case  of  such  extension,  indeed,  consciousness  would  dis- 
appear; becoming  the  whole,  it  would  lose  that  limitation 
by  virtue  of  which  it  is;  for  it  arises  from  the  opposition 
between  subject  and  object,  the  ego  and  the  non-ego,  and  the 
resulting  changes  of  state,  and  is  always  most  acute  in  those 
intensely  subjective  states  of  pain,  mental  or  bodily,  when 
the  individual  is  most  limited,  the  full  expression  of  his 
nature  most  impeded  or  repressed,  and  he  therefore  least  in 
harmony  with  the  whole.  The  act  of  transcending  human 
limitations,  were  it  possible,  and  of  becoming  universal  and 
unchangeable  would  be  its  self-annihilation.  A  supreme, 
absolute,  and  infinite  consciousness  could  not  be,  or  could  be 
only  as  an  eternal  unconscious  intuition,  were  that  conceiv- 
able humanly.  The  generalisation  of  a  divine  consciousness 
is  not  more  valid  than  would  be  the  generalisation  of  a  divine 
big  toe ;  for,  indeed,  to  suppose  a  universal  consciousness 
answering  in  any  way  to  the  sum  of  human  consciousnesses 
is  as  much  a  piece  of  anthropomorphism,  though  not  quite 
so  gross  and  palpable  an  instance,  as  to  represent  God  in  the 
exact  image  of  the  creature  man. 

It  is  another  pretty  piece  of  anthropomorphism — hardly 
less  so  than  to  make  God  moral — to  infer  from  our  observa- 
tion of  nature  that  He  is  working  out  some  great  purpose  in 
the  remote  future  through  multitudinous  adaptations,  direct 
and  circuitous,  simple  and  complicated,  of  means  to  ends; 
for  how  can  that  which  is  purpose  or  end,  according  to  the 
fashion  of  human  intelligence,  be  purpose  or  end  to  an 
unconditioned  and  infinite  intelligence?  Design  in  nature  is 
no  more  than  design  in  human  nature;  and  the  legitimate 
conclusion  of  man  from  his  discovery  of  it  is  not  as  to  the 
attested  existence  of  a  divine  designer,  but  as  to  the  clever 
deception  by  which  he,  the  real  designer,  has  projected  the 


230  WILTj  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

shadow  of  his  self-experience  and  transformed  it  into  an 
outside  divine  worker,  of  his  own  complexion.  But  see  his 
inconsistency  the  while !  In  the  same  breath  with  which  he 
pronounces  the  divine  end  to  be  past  finding  out,  incompre- 
hensible, inconceivable  bj  human  intelligence,  he  declares 
and  insists  on  the  existence  of  final  purpose  in  nature,  both 
in  the  particular  and  in  the  general.  He  postulates  an  emT, 
which,  being  a  term  that  derives  its  sole  meaning  from  and 
is  solely  applicable  to  human  conceptions,  is  simply  mean- 
ingless, pure  nonsense,  when  applied,  or  misapplied,  to  what 
transcends  human  conceptions. 

But  it  is  his  way,  in  magnitudes  that  outstretch  his 
conceptions,  habitually  to  use  meaningless  or  self-contra- 
dictory terms.  What  more  common  in  his  mouth,  for  ex- 
ample, than  such  expressions  as  infinite  number,  infinite 
multitude,  and  the  like,  when  number  is  number  by  virtue 
only  of  being  definite,  and  infinite  number  therefore  is 
number  which  is  not  number !  His  manner  of  reasoning 
of  the  final  causes  of  nature  from  his  standpoint  is  very 
much  as  if  an  oyster  were  to  construct  a  theory  of  human 
doings  in  London  or  Paris  from  the  basis  of  its  limited 
relations  with  the  interior  of  its  shell;  or  as  if  the  little 
worm  that  feeds  on  the  leaves  of  old  books  were  to  con- 
struct a  theory  of  their  purpose  from  its  experience  of  their 
uses  for  its  food.  Now  it  may  justly  be  doubted  whether  the 
lucubrations  of  an  oyster,  however  exceptionally  well  inspired 
with  the  divine  afflatus  of  prophecy,  or  the  intuitions  of  a 
book- worm,  though  never  so  much  experienced  among  books, 
would  rise  to  the  least  apprehension  of  human  doings  or  of 
human  uses  of  books.  In  which  connection  it  is  well  also  to 
bear  in  mind  that  the  vast  but  still  measurable  distance  by 
which  human  perception  outreaches  the  oyster's  perception 
is  very  little,  compared  with  the  immeasurable  distance  by 
which  human  perception  is  transcended  by  that  which  lies 
altogether  outside  its  range. 

In  the  end  it  is  somewhat  saddening  to  think  that  theo- 
logians will  insist  on  identifying  religion  with  theories  of 
cosmogony.  Their  notion  of  God  is  not  religion,  not  even 
an  essential  part  of  it,  but  a  metaphysical  theory  of  the  uni- 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PEODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  231 

verse  to  which,  whether  true  or  not,  religion  has  nothing  to 
say.  They  may  go  on  for  ever  questioning  the  eternal 
silence,  and  eternally  will  it  be  silent  to  their  questionings. 
Therefore  they  do  religion  an  ill  service  who  identify  it  with 
the  answers  which  they  imagine  they  extort  to  questions  to 
which  no  answer  can  be  given,  or  any  answer  that  is  given 
must  by  its  limitations  be  false.  The  pity  of  it  is  that  with  so 
ample  a  scope  for  their  best  energies  of  devotion  and  self- 
sacrifice  in  a  world  so  much  needing  to  be  made  better,  they 
should  waste  them  in  sterile  endeavours  to  think  the  un- 
thinkable. Having  settled  clearly  by  an  exhaustive  criticism 
of  their  own  faculties  that  they  cannot  know  anything  which 
is  not  relative,  why  immediately  go  back  to  the  barren  work 
of  constructing  theological,  moral,  or  metaphysical  theories  of 
the  absolute  ?  Yes,  and  from  the  very  basis  of  that  relativity 
which  they  have  just  proved  and  conceded  to  be  no  basis  at 
all.  Ideas  realise  perfection  in  different  degrees,  some  being 
more,  others  less  perfect — that  is  evident,  they  say;  there- 
fore it  is  legitimate  to  infer  a  complete  or  absolute  perfection 
from  which  they  are  derived  and  which  they  in  part  and 
darkly  resemble.  But  how  from  addition  of  imperfections 
ever  get  a  perfection  ?  Having  created  a  perfection  in  rela- 
tion to  their  ideas — that  is,  having  set  up  an  abstract  perfec- 
tion of  their  own,  which  is  still  entirely  relative — they  there- 
upon see  in  the  ideas  proofs  of  a  derivation  from  it,  and 
draw  from  them  an  argument  of  its  absolute  existence.  And 
so  for  ever  round  and  round  the  self-beguiling  circle. 

Every  theory  of  cosmogony  whatever  is  at  bottom  an 
outcome  of  nature  expressing  itself  through  human  nature; 
it  is  a  product  of  that  part  of  nature  which  is  being  human- 
ised in  man's  development,  not  a  supersession  of  it  by  any 
influx  from  without ;  it  does  not  therefore  ever,  nor  can  it 
ever,  dispense  with  that  positive  basis  of  nature,  or  possess 
a  higher  authority  than  its  source,  however  much  above  the 
things  of  this  world  it  may  aspire  or  assume  to  be.  How 
can  that  be  knowledge  which  contradicts  the  fundamental 
data  of  reasoning  and  thinking  by  which  alone  knowledge 
is  possible?  In  the  end  religion  will  preserve  its  vitality 
and  strengthen  its  power    only   by   breaking  through    old 


232  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

formiilas,  throwing  off  the  encumbering  fragments  of  dead 
creeds,  and  taking  a  new  and  purely  human  development : 
by  effecting  and  reflecting,  as  Christianity  at  its  outset 
did,  a  genuine  human  solidarity.  The  timid  hypocrisies 
which  hope  to  preserve  it  at  the  cost  of  the  true,  from  fear 
of  the  consequences  to  morality  if  the  truth*  be  made 
known,  will  have  to  be  abandoned ;  and  though  the  imme- 
diate result  of  their  rejection  may  be  sadly  afflicting  and 
seem  to  justify  despair,  yet  we  may  take  comfort  in  the 
certitude  that  the  ultimate  effects  will  be  good.  The  true 
good  cannot  consist  with  what  is  not  true ;  for  there  is  a  soli- 
darity among  the  virtues,  however  they  present  themselves, 
whether  as  that  which  is  true,  or  good,  or  beautiful. 


NOTES   TO   PART   TI. 


Page  195. 


Kant's  doctrine  is  that  there  is  a  determination  of  the  will  hy 
pure  reason ;  that  so  reason  gets  practical  reality ;  and  that  in  this 
absolute  obedience  the  will  has  absolute  assurance  of  its  freedom. 
The  moral  law  is  a  law  spontaneously  imposed  on  the  will  by  pure 
reason  :  it  stands  high  above  all  the  motives,  sensuous  and  their  like, 
"which  determine  the  empirical  wiU  ;  it  pays  no  respect  to  them,  but 
with  an  inward,  irresistible  necessity,  orders  us,  in  independence  of 
them,  to  follow  it  absolutely  and  unconditionally — 'tis  a  categorical 
imperative,  universal,  and  binding  on  every  rational  wUl.  A  happy 
thing,  certainly,  that  a  will  determined  to  unconditional  obedience 
by  so  absolute  an  authority  retains  nevertheless  the  absolute  assur- 
ance of  its  freedom.  But  then  comes  the  not  unimportant  question 
— What  is  it  that  practical  reason  categorically  commands  1  How 
are  we  to  know  what  the  moral  law  dictates  and  forbids?  The 
easiest  thing  in  the  world  :  let  only  those  maxims  of  conduct  derived 
from  experience  be  adopted  as  motives  which  are  susceptible  of  being 
made  of  universal  validity — which  are  fit  to  be  regarded  as  iiniversal 
laws  of  reason  to  govern  the  actions  of  all  mankind.  I  do  right  when 
T  do  what  all  persons  would  think  right  in  similar  circumstances. 
Yery  good,  without  doubt,  although  very  like  the  common -place 
maxim  of  every  ethical  system ;  but  my  difficulty  has  been  to  know 
in  a  particular  case  what  all  intelligent  beings  would  think  right. 
How  am  I  to  get  at  the  universal  standard  or  precept  and  apply  it 
to  my  particular  occasion,  so  as  to  know  absolutely  what  I  ought 
then  to  do  1 

Kant  helps  me  by  means  of  two  remarkable  illustrations.  Suicide 
is  one.  Is  suicide,  under  the  strongest  temptation  conceivable,  ever 
right  1  I  must  ask  myself  then,  *  Is  the  principle  of  the  admission 
that  suicide  is  ever  right  fit  to  become  a  universal  law  1 '  No,  says 
Kant,  it  is  not  fit,  since  the  universal  practice  of  suicide  would  reduce 
the  world  to  chaos.  Very  true  ;  but  it  is  sadly  disappointing  to  per- 
ceive that  the  sublime  and  supreme  reason  has,  in  order  to  become 
practical  reality,  found  it  necessary  to  come  down  from  its  supra- 
sensuous  heights  and  to  be  no  better  than  gross  Utilitarianism.  All 
16 


234  WILL  IN  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

that  it  can  tell  me,  panting  for  its  supreme  utterance,  is  that  suicide 
is  inexpedient  as  a  universal  principle  of  conduct — in  fact,  it  makes 
use  of  the  common  motives  of  an  experience  which  is  nowise  supra- 
sensuons,  and  instead  of  helping  me  to  an  absolute  precept  or  standard 
to  measure  them  by,  actually  comes  to  them  for  its  authority. 

The  second  instance  is  no  more  helpful.  May  a  person  in  the 
greatest  need  of  a  loan,  which  he  knows  he  will  not  get  unless  he 
makes  a  solemn  promise  to  repay  what  he  is  perfectly  certain  he  never 
will  be  able  to  repay,  make  the  promise  1  No,  says  Kant,  for  if  it 
were  a  universal  law,  all  faith  in  promises  would  be  destroyed  and 
nobody  would  lend  money.  In  other  words,  in  the  long  run  it  would 
be  very  bad  for  society  that  faith  in  promises  should  be  destroyed. 
An  excellent  truth,  which  nobody  will  deny,  but  it  evidently  smacks 
much  of  the  earth,  earthy ;  indeed,  it  would  seem  that  those  who 
discover  the  basis  of  morality  in  the  social  sanction  may  claim  Kant, 
when  he  is  not  in  the  clouds,  as  an  out-and-out  supporter. 

Theories  of  freewill  seem  to  come  very  much  to  this — that  the 
will  that  is  swayed  by  low  motives  is  not  free,  that  the  will  that  is 
swayed  by  higher  motives  is  more  free,  and  that  the  will  that  is 
swayed  by  the  highest  motives  is  most  free.  Consequently  when  any 
one  is  blamed  for  having  done  ill,  he  is  not  blamed  for  having  acted 
without  motives,  but  for  not  having  been  actuated  by  the  highest 
motives.  Create  an  artificial  world  of  names  apart  from  the  real 
world  of  facts — a  world  which  shall  simply  be  made  up  of  negations  of 
all  qualities  which  we  have  actual  experience  of — and  let  the  highest 
motive  in  it  be  known  as  the  Will  of  God  or  abstract  Supreme 
Reason,  you  get  your  service  which  you  please  to  call  perfect  freedom. 


Page  231. 

"We  may  notice  how  religion  stands  in  relation  to  theology, 
according  to  one  of  the  greatest  modern  exponents  of  those  relations, 
and  how  it  suffers  by  the  enforced  union.  By  religion,  says  Cardinal 
Newman,  *  I  mean  the  knowledge  of  God,  of  His  Will,  and  of  our 
duties  to  Him.'  '  At  the  outset  then  we  are  to  understand  that  there 
can  be  no  religion  without  a  knowledge  of  God,  of  His  Will,  and  of 
our  duties  to  Him.  A  philosopher  of  the  future  from  the  ends 
of  the  earth,  his  mind  not  impregnated  by  inheritance,  nor  imbued 
by  education,  with  the  prepossessions  of  any  theological  system,  will 

'   fframmar  of  Assent,  pp.  384,  386,  &c. 


CERTAIN  MENTAL  PRODUCTS  OF  EVOLUTION.  235 

naturally  ask,  What  God?  in  face  of  the  different  gods  that  have 
been  worshipped  at-sundry  times  and  in  divers  places,  and  demand 
some  credentials,  as  he  has  the  right  to  do.  He  is  a  '  hidden  God,' 
for  *  what  strikes  the  miad  so  forcibly  and  so  painfully  is  His  absence 
from  His  own  world.'  Then  there  is  this  further  characteristic — 
*  that  the  aspect  under  which  Almighty  Gk)d  is  presented  to  us  by 
nature  is  (to  use  a  figure)  of  one  who  is  angry  with  us  and  threatens 
evil.'  That  is  because  *  our  shortcomings  are  more  frequent  and  im- 
portant than  our  fulfilment  of  the  duties  enjoined  upon  us,'  and 
because  the  principle  of  His  divine  government  ordains  that  the 
offender  should  suffer  for  his  offence.  In  respect  of  this  humanly 
vindictive  character  He  resembles  the  gods  which  the  savage  has 
conceived  for  himself  by  the  unaided  light  of  nature  ;  and  when  we 
go  to  the  authorised  revelation  of  Him  for  further  light,  we  meet 
with  the  exposition  of  like  human  characters,  for  we  learn  there  that 
he  is  a  jealous  God,  revengeful,  easily  provoked  to  anger,  loving  what 
pleases  and  hating  what  displeases  Him ;  who  admires  His  own  work, 
shows  no  mercy  to  His  enemies,  visits  the  sins  of  the  fathers  upon 
the  children  unto  the  third  and  fourth  generations,  and  decrees 
eternal  torment  for  those  who  observe  not  His  commandments  to  keep 
them.  Evidently  this  sentence  of  eternal  damnation  is  the  consum- 
mate evolution  of  the  anger  of  a  God  made  in  the  image  of  man.  It 
is  in  a  knowledge  of  Him,  however,  and  His  "Will  that  the  earnest 
inquirer  is  to  seek  and  to  find  his  duties  as  a  man  :  the  highest  duties 
of  man  to  God  and  man  impossible  of  attainment  save  in  that  way. 
And  how  is  he  to  attain  such  knowledge  1  By  examining  conscience. 
'  Our  great  internal  teacher  of  religion  is  conscience.  .  .  .  Conscience 
too  teaches  us  not  only  that  God  is,  but  what  He  is ;  it  provides  for 
the  mind  a  real  image  of  Him  as  a  medium  of  worship ;  it  gives  a 
rule  of  right  and  wrong  as  being  His  rule,  and  a  code  of  moral  duties.' 
Here  then  we  learn  what  certainly  is  not  a  little  surprising,  that  con- 
science teaches  a  knowledge  of  God,  imparts  a  real  image  of  Him,  and 
gives  us  a  code  of  moral  duties.  Kant  recognised  the  moral  impera- 
tive in  conscience  and  fell  down  in  adoration  of  it,  but  he  never  found 
a  complete  moral  code  there.  Let  a  man  only  learn  the  art  of  inter- 
rogatiag  conscience  cleverly,  and  he  has  an  infallible  revelation  of 
what  God  is  and  wills,  of  what  He  is  like,  and  of  what  He  ordains  in 
every  particular  case.  But  will  every  one  be  able  really  to  find,  if 
he  tries,  these  stupendous  contents  in  his  conscience  1  Will  not  the 
absolute  which  he  finds  attest  the  relative  of  his  conscience  ?  Will  the 
Delaware  Indian  or  Andaman  Islander  ever  extract  these  sublime  posi- 
tive revelations  from  within  himself?     In  truth  it  is  to  give  an  extra- 


236  WILL  m  ITS  PHYSIOLOGICAL  ASPECT. 

ordinary  extension  to  the  meaning  of  the  word  *  conscience  '  to  find  all 
these  things  in  it ;  for  surely  it  is  not  the  fact  that  the  function  of  con- 
science is  knowledge ;  it  is  not  by  it  that  we  know,  but  it  is  by  it  that 
we  feel,  the  right  and  the  obligation  to  do  it  and  feel  the  wrong  and  the 
obligation  to  shun  it.  But  there  is  no  fixed  measure  in  conscience  by 
which  is  determined  universally  and  infallibly  what  is  the  particular 
right  or  wrong ;  for  always,  in  all  times  and  places,  the  particular  right 
or  wrong  has  answered  to  the  moral  development  of  the  tribe,  the  com- 
munity, the  nation.  Conscience  might  more  justly  be  described  as 
the  consocial  sense,  which  is  developed  in  men  from  con-science  and 
confederation — i.e.  from  knowing  and  working  together  in  social  union, 
from  unity  in  aim  and  means  :  set  men  to  work  together  for  a 
common  end  in  a  social  union  and  they  will  end  by  feeling  together. 
So  it  has  come  to  pass  that  the  consciences  have  notoriously  been  as 
various  as  the  communities  of  men,  and  that  Cardinal  Newman  finds 
at  the  present  day  in  his  conscience  the  cosmogony  and  the  moral 
code  of  Christian  theology,  as  interpreted  and  guaranteed  by  the  in- 
fallible authority  of  the  Koman  Catholic  Church.  Had  he  lived 
among  the  savages  who  thought  it  a  pious  duty  to  eat  their  aged 
parents,  he  could  not  have  failed  to  find  in  conscience  the  authority 
to  eat  his  father,  as  he  now  in  profoundest  reverence  eats  the  body  of 
his  God  at  the  most  holy  ceremony  of  his  faith. 


PAET  m. 

TEE    PATHOLOGY    OF    WILL. 


SECTION  I. 

CONCEENIKG   DEGENEEATION. 

The  attention  of  the  philosophic  and  scientific  world  has 
been  so  much  fixed  on  the  theory  of  evolution,  ever  since 
Darwin  set  forth  the  main  manner  of  the  process  by  means 
of  the  survival  of  the  fittest  through  natural  selection,  that 
there  has  been  a  proneness  to  overlook  the  fact  that  all  we 
see  and  feel  around  us  is  not  progress — in  the  sense  we 
understand  progress.  Survival  of  the  fittest  does  not  mean 
always  survival  of  the  best  in  the  sense  of  the  highest  organ- 
ism ;  it  means  only  the  survival  of  that  which  is  best  suited 
to  the  circumstances,  good  or  bad,  in  which  it  is  placed — th.e 
survival  of  a  savage  in  a  savage  social  medium,  of  a  rogue 
among  rogues,  of  a  parasite  where  a  parasite  alone  can  live. 
A  decline  from  a  higher  to  a  lower  level  of  being,  a  process, 
that  is  to  say,  of  degeneration,  is  an  integrant  and  active 
I)art  of  the  economy  of  nature.  Besides  the  organisms  that 
have  become  step  by  step  more  and  more  complex  and  per- 
fect, there  are  organisms  that  have  plainly  lost  in  the  suc- 
cessions of  the  ages  organs  which,  bringing  them,  when  they 
had  them,  into  wider  and  freer  and  closer  relations  with  the 
external  world,  ministered  to  a  higher  and  fuller  life  than 
they  enjoy  now :  witness  in  proof,  for  example,  the  wingless 
beetles  of  Madeira,  the  rudimentary  wings  of  the  birds  of 
oceanic  isles,  the  imperfect  and  nearly  useless  wings  of 
domestic  fowls  like  the  Cochin  China  fowl,  the  small  eyes  ol 


238  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

moles,  some  parasites  tlia,t  live  on  otlier  organisms ;  and  I 
might  justly  go  on  to  add  such  instances  as  the  lapse  of 
heroic  feeling  in  commercial  states,  the  loss  of  self-respect  in 
the  courtier,  the  demoralisation  of  popular  preachers  and  of 
popular  scientific  lecturers,  and  many  others  of  a  like  kind 
which  illustrate  the  subdual  of  the  person's  nature  to  the 
moral  atmosphere  that  he  works  in.  It  is  the  same  with  a 
creed  or  system  of  belief ;  in  which,  when  it  undergoes  de- 
generation, the  higher  parts  waste  and  the  lower  parts  grow. 
For  example,  when  a  savage  people  are  converted  to  Christi- 
anity they  assimilate  by  natural  affinity  the  lowest  elements, 
and  reject,  being  unable  to  apprehend  them,  the  highest; 
so  the  higher  element  disappears,  or  is  degraded  by  the 
association  of  low  ideas  into  something  quite  different;  the 
unique  figure  of  Jesus  Christ  becoming  no  more  than  that  of 
the  biggest  fetish,  the  fetish  of  the  white  man. 

Disuse  of  function  leads  everywhere  to  decay  of  organ ;  by 
decay  of  organ  going  on  through  generations  that  which  was 
complete  and  capable  becomes  rudimentary  and  incapable ; 
and  so  in  a  backward  course  the  organ  or  organism  reaches 
a  state  of  degradation  of  which  it  is  hard  to  say  sometimes 
whether  it  is  the  relic  of  a  more  perfect  structure  which  has 
been,  or  the  inchoate  rudiment  of  a  new  structure  which  is  to 
be.  Then  it  presents  a  problem  about  which  men  may  doubt 
and  dispute,  just  as  in  reference  to  their  own  true  position  in 
nature  they  have  disputed  whether  they  are  what  they  are  by 
a  degeneration  from  a  higher  to  a  lower  state,  or  whether 
they  are  steps  in  a  process  of  evolution  from  a  lower  to  a 
higher  state,  ascendent  or  descendent,  beings  a  little  lower 
than  the  angels  or  a  little  higher  than  the  brutes.  How- 
ever that  be — and  the  possible  angelic  relation  is  not  a  matter 
of  great  moment,  since  the  angels  that  they  were  only  a 
little  lower  than  could  not  in  any  case  have  been  of  a  very 
exalted  kind — it  admits  of  no  doubt  that  a  law  of  degenera- 
tion is  manifest  in  human  events  ;  that  each  individual,  each 
family,  each  nation  may  take  either  an  upward  course  of 
evolution  or  a  downward  course  of  degeneracy.  Noteworthy 
too  in  this  relation  is  the  fact  that  when  the  organism — 
individual,  social,  or  national — has  reached  a  certain  state  of 


CONCERNING  DEGENERATION.  239 

complex  evolution  it  inevitably  breeds  cbanges  in  itself  which 
disintegrate  and  in  the  end  destroy  it.  It  cannot  maintain 
its  equilibrium  for  ever  in  face  of  its  environment,  and  ceas- 
ing to  aggregate  to  itself  it  begins  to  disintegrate,  ceasing  to 
progress  begins  to  regress,  ceasing  to  develope  begins  to  de- 
cline :  changing  always,  when  it  changes  not  for  the  better 
it  changes  for  the  worse.  Perfect  repose  is  death.  Here 
again  a  creed  or  system  of  belief  behaves  in  the  same  way, 
giving  rise  in  the  process  of  its  decomposition  to  retrograde 
products  that  cannot  serve  for  evolution,  since  they  are 
events  of  a  dissolution  which,  as  disintegrants,  they  help  to 
expedite.  It  is  a  process  which  may  not  perhaps  be  easily 
traced  in  the  case  of  a  particular  belief,  but  it  is  evident 
enough  after  one  of  those  great  historical  events,  such  as  the 
break-up  of  a  system  of  religion  or  of  a  political  constitution, 
which  befall  only  at  intervals  of  centuries. 

In  nature,  as  we  see  it,  we  seem  to  see  a  conflict  of 
warring  opposites  :  gravitation  opposed,  or  rather  indeed 
complemented,  by  repulsion ;  chemical  afiinities  by  chemical 
repulsions ;  magnetic  attraction  by  electric  repulsion ;  evo- 
lution by  dissolution;  conservatism  by  revolution,  quiet  or 
catastrophic ;  love  by  hate ;  self-love  by  love  of  kind ;  heaven 
by  hell.  Certain  it  is  that  hate  and  destruction  are  just  as 
necessary  agents  as  love  and  production  in  nature,  which 
could  no  more  be,  or  be  conceived  to  be,  without  the  one  than 
without  the  other ;  and  to  call  the  one  good  more  than  the 
other,  however  necessary  from  the  standpoint  of  human  ego- 
ism, is  just  as  if  one  were  to  call  gravitation  good  and  repul- 
sion bad,  as  gravitation,  had  it  self-consciousness,  would  no 
doubt  do.  In  order  to  have  a  theory  of  cosmogony  that 
shall  cover  all  the  facts,  it  has  always  been  necessary  to  sup- 
plement a  good  principle  by  a  bad  principle,  a  God  of  love 
and  creation  by  a  God  of  hate  and  destruction.  And  it  must 
always  be  so.  We  may,  agreeably  to  the  logic  of  our  wishes, 
comfort  ourselves  in  our  pilgrimage  by  entertaining  the  hope 
and  belief  of  the  working  out  of  good  through  evil  and  of  the 
permanence  of  good  after  the  disappearance  of  evil,  just  as, 
if  it  were  useful  and  pleasing  to  us  to  cherish  the  illusion, 
we  might  persuade  ourselves  that  repulsion  will  one  day  be 


240  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

annihilated  and  gravitation  endure,  or  that  evolution  will 
continue  and  dissolution  cease  to  be ;  but  if  we  look  at  the 
matter  in  the  cold  spirit  of  strictly  rational  inquiry  we  shall 
always  find  abundant  reason  to  believe  that  the  sum  of  the 
respective  energies  of  good  and  evil  remains  a  constant 
quantity,  the  respective  distribution  only  varying,  and  that 
we  might  as  well  try  to  increase  the  height  of  the  mountain 
without  increasing  the  depth  of  the  valley,  as  to  increase  the 
good  in  the  world  by  purging  it  of  its  so-called  evil. 

And  now  to  inquire  briefly  what  is  meant  by  degenera- 
tion. It  means  literally  an  unlcinding,  the  undoing  of  a 
Tcind,  and  in  this  sense  was  first  used  to  express  the  change 
of  kind  without  regard  to  whether  the  change  was  to  perfect 
or  to  degrade ;  but  it  is  now  used  exclusively  to  denote  a 
change  from  a  higher  to  a  lower  kind,  that  is  to  say,  from  a 
more  complex  to  a  less  complex  organisation  :  it  is  a  process 
of  dissolution,  the  opposite  of  that  process  of  involution 
which  is  pre-essential  to  evolution.  In  proportion  therefore 
to  the  complexity  of  evolution  is  the  possible  diversity  of 
degeneration :  the  more  complex  the  organism  the  greater 
the  number  and  variety  of  its  diseases ;  the  more  varied 
and  beautiful  animal  forms  are,  the  greater  are  the  varieties 
of  the  examples  of  ugliness  and  degradation  which  they 
furnish ;  and  great  cities  which  are  the  centres  of  the  best 
intellectual  light  become  naturally  the  centres  of  the 
greatest  vices.  Bacon  had  noticed  the  fact  of  degeneration 
in  plants  and  laid  stress  upon  it — '  This  rule,'  he  says,  '  is 
certain,  that  plants  for  want  of  culture  degenerate  to  be 
baser  in  the  same  kind,  and  sometimes  so  far  as  to  change 
into  another  kind ; '  and  he  enumerates  certain  changes  of 
condition  which  bring  the  changes  about.  Not  that  a 
process  of  degeneration  ever  brings  a  higher  species  of 
organism  to  the  structural  pattern  of  a  lower  species ;  in 
order  to  do  that,  it  would  have  to  go  backwards  through  as 
long  a  reach  of  time,  and  as  many  stages  of  regressive  ex- 
perience in  relation  to  simultaneous  regressive  changes  of 
surroundings,  as  the  lower  species  had  traversed  forwards  in 
its  upward  transpeciation.  Granted  that  man  comes  of  an 
ancestral  stock  common  to  him   and  the  monkey,  still  no 


CONCERNING  DEGENEEATION.  241 

excess  of  degeneration  would  ever  reduce  him  to  the  monkey- 
pattern  ;  it  may  certainly  sink  him  very  low,  as  the  repulsive 
example  of  a  speechless,  helpless  and  slavering  idiot  shows, 
but  the  traits  of  degeneracy  bear  a  distinctly  human  stamp, 
they  have  that  superscription  and  image.  The  unJcinding 
which  we  call  degeneration  is  not  then  the  reduction  of  a 
higher  kind  to  a  lower  normal  kind,  but  the  transformation 
of  it  into  a  new  or  abnormal  kind ;  a  kind  which,  incapable 
of  rising  in  the  scale  of  development,  tends  naturally  to  sink 
lower  and  lower. 

As  in  the  decomposition  of  a  complex  organic  compound 
new  products  are  formed  that  had  no  part  in  its  composition, 
and  that  are  never  met  with  except  as  the  products  of  such 
decomposition ;  or  as  new  morbid  elements  are  formed  in  the 
disintegrating  processes  of  disease,  the  ravages  of  which 
they  thereupon  accelerate ;  so  new  products  of  an  asocial  or 
antisocial  kind  are  formed  in  the  retrograde  metamorphosis 
of  the  human  kind;  wherefore  it  is  that  we  meet  with  not 
only  degenerate  varieties  of  the  kind,  such  as  idiots  and 
lunatics  are,  but  also  with  a  great  many  forms  and  varieties 
of  degradation  in  persons  who  are  neither  idiots  nor  lunatics. 
Is  it  not,  for  example,  a  remarkable  thing,  when  we  think 
of  it,  that  man,  highest  of  the  animals — so  much  so  that 
the  base  kinship  repugns  him — should  have  invented  and 
practised  everywhere  a  variety  of  sexual  vices  which  no 
a.nimals,  though  having  as  strong  sexual  passions  as  he  has, 
ever  perpetrate  ?  The  ingenuity  of  vice  which  he  has 
achieved  in  that  respect  has  reached  the  limit  of  its  variety 
only  in  the  limits  of  the  physical  capacities  of  his  bodily 
mechanism ;  so  that,  these  having  been  now  exhausted, 
happily  no  one,  how  great  soever  his  practical  genius,  will 
be  able  to  invent  a  new  vice  of  that  sort.  He  has  used  his 
reason  to  be  more  brutal  than  the  brutes  ;  and  when  he  has 
devised  and  done  some  deed  so  ingeniously  bad  that  no 
brute  ever  did  the  like,  he  characterises  it  specially  as  brutal 
and  inhuman.  Brutal,  that  is  to  say,  when  no  brute  was 
ever  capable  of  it,  inhuman  when  it  is  entirely  and  exclu- 
sively human  I 


242  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

It  is  not  the  brute,  but  the  degradation  of  the  brute  in 
him,  that  he  ought  to  accuse;  for  instead  of  using  his 
higher  nature  to  exalt  his  lower  nature  he  has  used  its 
resources  to  degrade  the  latter  to  the  utmost.  The  variety 
of  his  ingenious  vices  bespeaks  the  foul  misuse  of  his  superior 
reason  to  gratify  the  fundamental  passions  and  selfish  im- 
pulses of  his  nature ;  he  exhausts  all  the  devices  of  ingenuity 
in  order  to  enhance  and  multiply  desires  and  to  vary  the 
modes  of  their  gratification ;  and  in  doing  that,  blind  the 
while  to  the  necessity  of  idealising,  he  is  in  the  state  of 
all  states  most  dangerous — that  of  man  knowing  and  real- 
ising the  truth  that  he  is  animal,  but  not  knowing  and 
realising  the  truth  that  he  is  not  all  animal.  The  po- 
tentiality of  a  more  complex  development  is  always  the 
potentiality  of  a  more  varied  degeneration :  tl^  height  of 
Heaven  the  measure  of  the  depth  of  Hell.  He  does  well 
then  to  upbraid,  in  fitting  terms  of  disgust  and  contempt, 
the  prostitution  of  reason  to  the  guilty  degradation  of  his 
animal  nature — though  libelling  the  animal  in  the  terms  he 
uses — to  the  end  that  the  thought  of  what  he  has  done  may 
turn  him  from  the  wrong  way  of  degeneration  and  urge  hiiu 
to  pursue  the  right  way  of  evolution.  Eetrograde  products 
of  any  sort,  however,  are  no  less  normal  in  their  way  than 
the  products  of  evolution,  just  as  earthquakes  are  as  natural 
as  summer  breezes,  pestilences  as  natural  as  prayers.  When 
men  describe  them  as  abnormal,  unnatural  and  the  like,  it 
is  because  they  regard  them  from  one  aspect  of  human  life 
— from  the  standpoint  of  a  progressive  human  movement. 
Yiew  them  as  events  of  the  Whole,  as  an  all-encompassing, 
all-seeing  Being  might  be  supposed  to  do,  and  in  that  uni- 
versal view  from  the  standpoint  of  a  regressive  human 
movement — a  tide  which,  flowing  here  and  now,  ebbs  there 
and  then — and  they  would  seem  most  fit  and  proper. 


SECTION  II. 

CONGENITAL   DEFICIENCE   OR   ABSENCE    OP   MOEAL   PEELING 
AND   WILL. 

In  what  function,  and  in  what  changes  of  it,  is  it  that  the 
beginnings  of  human  degeneracy  show  themselves?  It  is 
obvious  that  in  searching  for  the  answer  to  this  question  we 
must  occupy  ourselves  with  the  most  highly  developed  states 
of  man,  since  the  earliest  and  most  subtile  signs  of  degene- 
ration can  be  found  only  in  the  most  fully  developed 
specimens.  Bear  in  mind  that  our  business  now  is  with  the 
individual,  not  with  the  complex  union  of  individuals  which 
is  known  as  a  nation,  albeit  it  may  be  of  interest  to  note  in 
passing  that  national  degeneration  begins  in  what  is  strictly 
a  fZemoralisation — ^namely,  in  a  loss  of  patriotism ;  by  which 
I  mean  not  the  noisy  and  aggressive  so-called  patriotism 
that  rushes  into  quarrels  and  combats  in  order  to  aggrandise 
the  nation,  but  the  calm  and  pure  patriotism  which, 
inspiring  seK-abnegation  and  the  sacrifice  of  individual 
interests  to  the  good  of  the  community,  consolidates  a 
nation.  In  like  manner,  in  the  individual  it  is  the  function 
of  will  in  the  highest  moral  sphere — the  region  of  moral 
feeling  which,  representing  the  highest  reach  of  evolution, 
is  the  consummate  inflorescence  of  human  culture — that 
will  be  the  first  to  exhibit  signs  of  impairment :  the  latest 
and  highest  product  of  social  evolution,  that  which,  latest 
organised,  is  least  stable,  will  be  the  first  to  undergo  disso- 
lution. 

In  order  to  ascertain  whether  the  facts  of  observation 
agree  with  this  deduction  it  will  be  right  to  examine  them 
frankly,  without  bias,  and  to  see  what  independent  induction 
they  warrant.  Should  the  induction  and  the  deduction 
agree,  all  the  more  shall  we  feel  the  conclusion  sound. 
Look  then  in  the  first  instance  at  the  lowest  specimens  of 
beings  in  a  civilised  people,  those  who,  marking  the  last 
term  of  human  degeneracy,  have  never  had  the  responsibility 
even  of  a  capacity  to  degenerate,  having  been  born  essen- 


244  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

tially  deficient — the  congenital  idiots;  beings  -who,  disin- 
herited of  their  human  birthright  by  reason  of  native  defect 
of  bodily  structure  generally  and  of  cerebral  structure  and 
function  in  particular,  are  incapable  of  a  normal  mental 
development,  and  some  of  them  incapable  of  any  mental 
development  whatever.  In  them  we  have  human  beings  so 
radically  deteriorated,  and  that  without  any  fault  of  their 
own,  souls  so  enthralled  somehow  in  the  meshes  of  unsuit- 
able matter,  that  they  are  without  the  potentiality  of 
becoming  truly  human.  They  are  a  reductio  ad  ahsurdum  of 
humanity  by  the  logic  of  facts :  a  pretty  plain  proof  that 
the  way  of  evolution  goes  in  the  opposite  direction  to  the 
way  by  which  they  have  come  to  be.  It  is  not  enough  to 
dismiss  them  from  consideration  as  monstrosities,  morbid 
products,  anomalies,  abnormal  creatures,  accidents,  and  the 
like,  for  that  sort  of  labelling  of  them  is  not  in  the  least 
instructive,  nor  does  it  advance  matters  a  step ;  they  have 
been  bred  of  human  stock  and  are  what  they  are  by  virtue 
of  natural  processes,  the  laws  of  which  may  be  investigated 
and  their  issues  modified.  "We  cannot  blame  the  idiot  for 
being  what  he  is :  whom  then  can  we  blame  ?  If  we  may 
not  accuse  the  bungling  of  his  father  who  begot  him,  or  the 
folly  of  his  mother  who  conceived  and  bore  him,  assuredly 
we  have  the  right  to  hold  mankind  responsible  for  him. 

Putting  aside  what  may  be  called  accidental  causes  of 
idiocy,  that  is  to  say,  causes  arising  out  of  some  accident  or 
bad  state  of  health  in  the  parents,  one  pretty  sure  and 
regular  way  of  producing  the  congenital  defect  is  by  the 
increase  of  degeneracy  through  generations.  Were  a 
curious  person  minded  to  breed  a  race  of  idiots  he  would 
probably  obtain  a  large  measure  of  success  by  setting  a 
number  of  insane,  epileptic,  and  weak-minded  persons  to 
propagate ;  so  he  would  bring  degeneracy  to  its  patho- 
logical term,  human  disintegration  to  its  simplest  retrograde 
human  product.  If  he  tried  to  reach  a  still  lower  depth  in 
this  deep  of  degeneracy  by  setting  idiots  to  breed,  or  if  he 
aspired  to  keep  up  a  race  of  idiots  in  that  way,  he  would 
fail;  he  would  find  it  impossible  to  carry  the  retrograde 
metamorphosis  or  process  of  dehumanisation   any  further; 


CONGENITAL  DEFECTS  OF  WILL.  245 

impotence  and  sterility  in  his  breed  of  idiots  would  bring 
his  experiments  to  an  abrupt  end.  Nature  has  put  a  limit 
to  deliumanisation  in  the  qualities  which,  she  exacts  in  order 
that  the  combination  of  two  individuals  to  produce  a  third 
may  take  place  at  all.  There  are  then  two  terms  between 
which  all  sorts  and  varieties  of  men  may  be  ranged — the 
lowest  term  of  degeneration  and  the  highest  term  of  evolu- 
tion, and  towards  the  one  or  the  other  of  them  each  indi- 
vidual in  the  fluent  line  of  being  is  tending :  a  double  flux 
of  movement,  as  it  were,  ascendent  and  descendent,  the 
ways  or  modes  of  degeneration  in  the  descendent  line  being 
almost  as  many  and  divers  as  the  varieties  of  evolution  in 
the  ascendent  line.  Some  persons  are  high  on  the  upward, 
others  low  on  the  downward,  path ;  many  are  just  entering 
upon  the  one  or  the  other ;  but  there  is  no  one  who  is  not 
himself  going  in  the  one  or  the  other  direction  and  making 
the  way  which  he  takes  easier  for  others  to  follow  in. 

It  goes  without  saying  that  among  other  qualities  in 
which  idiots  are  wanting  they  are  wanting  in  moral  feeling 
and  will;  indeed,  the  manifold  varieties  of  idiocy  and  im- 
becility, representing  all  degrees  and  sorts  of  mental 
deficience  from  the  least  to  the  greatest,  yield  examples 
of  all  degrees  of  moral  deprivation  and  of  volitional 
impotence.  Here  it  shall  suffice  to  call  attention  to  a  case 
well  suited  to  bring  home  to  the  mind  the  necessity  of  a 
scientific  view  of  such  defects  and  of  a  scientific  inquiiy 
into  their  nature ;  and  it  is  of  set  purpose  that  I  select  an 
instance  which  presents  no  marked  nor  even  manifest  defect 
of  brain  and  of  ordinary  intelligence,  but  in  which  the 
moral  derangement  is  extreme ;  because  it  will  serve  to 
show  how  the  fine  layer  of  moral  feeling  and  the  supreme 
reason  embedded  in  it,  so  to  speak,  may  be  deranged  or 
clean  stripped  off  from  the  mind  at  the  beginning  of  its 
degeneracy,  without  the  ordinary  intelligence  being  seriously 
touched. 

The  case  is  that  of  a  young  child,  five  or  six  years  of 
age  only,  which  is  causing  its  anxious  parents  no  little  ap- 
prehension and  distress  by  the  singularly  precocious  display 
of  vicious   proclivities  of  all   sorts,  quite   out  of  keeping 


246  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

with  its  tender  years — miscliievous  and  destructive  impulses, 
cruel  and  perverse  acts,  amazing  skill  in  thieving  and 
lying,  even  perhaps  a  startling  sexual  precocity — and  by 
the  utter  failure  of  either  precept  or  example  or  correction 
to  imbue  it  with  right  feeling  and  with  the  desire  to  do 
right.  So  strong  is  the  natural  bent  to,  and  so  intense  the 
immediate  pleasure  in,  these  wrong-doings  that  punishment 
is  useless  to  check  them.  It  may  not,  as  I  have  said,  be 
notably  deficient  in  intelligence;  on  the  contrary,  it  is 
sometimes  capable  of  learning  quickly  when  it  pleases,  par- 
ticularly perhaps  in  some  special  line  of  knowledge  for  which 
it  shows  a  singular  talent,  and  it  displays  acute  cunning 
in  finding  and  devising  the  occasions  to  gratify  its  evil  in- 
clinations. It  is  a  moral  idiot  without  being  an  idiot  in 
self-seeking  and  self-serving  intelligence :  the  defect  of 
intelligence  is  that  it  is  capable  only  of  half  its  function, 
being  acute  to  apprehend  self,  impotent  to  apprehend  the 
social  not-self.  Not  that  the  child  can  be  said  to  be 
altogether  insensible  to  the  difference  between  right  and 
wrong,  since  it  invariably  shuns  the  right  and  chooses  the 
wrong,  and  shows  an  amazing  acuteness  in  the  means  it 
uses  to  escape  detection  and  the  punishment  that  might 
follow  detection.  But  it  certainly  does  not  feel  the  right  as 
right,  as  something  stirring  an  impulse  of  attraction,  and 
the  wrong  as  wrong,  as  something  stirring  an  impulse  of 
repulsion;  and  accordingly  punishment  awakens  no  sensi- 
bility to  the  social  or  moral  meaning  of  conduct,  no  internal 
social  response,  provokes  only  an  acuter  display  of  low 
cunning  in  the  endeavour  to  evade  it.  The  creature  is 
truly  an  asocial  being.  So  incorribly  vicious  as  it  is  at  so 
tender  an  age,  so  perseveringly  set  on  evil-doing,  so  utterly 
incapable  of  penitence,  everybody  who  has  to  do  with  it  feels 
in  the  end  that  it  is  not  really  responsible  for  its  conduct, 
perceives  sadly  that  the  severest  punishment  cannot  do  it 
the  least  good,  and  is  constrained  to  acknowledge  that  it 
labours  under  a  native  incapacity  of  moral  development :  it 
is  congenitally  conscienceless. 

The  main  scientific  interest  of  a  case  of  the  kind  lies  in 
the  inquiry  how  it  is  that  a  human  being  has  been  born 


CONGENITAL  DEFECTS   OF  WILL.  247 

into  tlie  world  who  is  unimbued  with  innate  moral,  and  is 
imbued  with  innate  immoral,  tendencies ;  who  will,  nay  must, 
go  wrong  in  virtue  of  his  bad  organisation,  and  who  mani- 
fests such  precocious  capabilities  of  wickedness.  Putting 
aside  the  theory  of  Satanic  inspiration  as  not  being  an 
adequate  explanation  in  an  age  that  at  least  is  infected 
with  the  spirit,  where  it  is  not  imbued  with  the  habit,  of 
scientific  thought,  and  having  the  certitude  that  the  effect 
defective  comes  by  cause,  we  look  to  the  line  of  the  child's 
descent  for  an  explanation,  to  the  nature  of  the  antecedents 
of  which  it  is  the  consequent,  and  seek  in  ancestral  infirm- 
ities, errors,  misfortunes,  and  wrong-doings  for  the  cause  of 
the  defective  organisation ;  defective,  that  is  to  say,  for 
social  organisation,  but,  everything  being  by  a  divine  dis- 
pensation good  of  its  kind,  very  effective  for  social  disorgan- 
isation. As  a  general  fact  it  will  be  found  that  such 
children  are  descended  from  a  family  in  which  insanity  or 
epilepsy  or  some  form  or  other  of  mental  degeneracy  exists, 
and  exists  not  as  an  accident  but  as  an  essential  outcome  of 
character ;  that  they  are  antisocial  upshots  of  a  process  of 
degeneration  in  the  line  of  their  descent,  manufactured 
morbid  varieties  of  the  human  kind.  The  lapse  or  absence 
of  the  highest  inhibitory  sensibilities  and  powers  in  the  lives 
of  the  parents  has  issued  so  in  the  nature  of  the  offspring — 
those  antisocial  in  life,  these  are  asocial  conge nitally :  it  is  an 
example  of  the  law  of  degeneration  avenging  the  infraction 
of  the  law  of  evolution :  a  product  and  a  nemesis  at  the 
same  moment. 

Taking  free  leave  to  put  complicated  and  obscure  facts 
into  a  somewhat  ideally  simple  scheme,  one  might  represent 
the  stages  of  descent  in  this  fashion:  1.  Absence  of  exercise, 
and  through  disuse  decay,  of  the  highest  social  sensibi- 
lities and  powers,  moral  and  volitional,  in  one  generation ; 
therewith  lifelong,  unchecked  exercise  of  the  secondary  or 
social  developments  of  the  egoistic  passions  in  the  conduct 
of  life;  a  consequent  moral  degeneration  which  by  its  nature 
goes  deeper  into  character  than  intellectual  degeneration. 
2.  In  a  succeeding  generation  some  form  or  other  of  positive 
mental  derangement ;  or  such  a  development  of  vice  in  char- 


248  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

acter  as  falls  a  little  short  only  of  madness  or  of  crime.  3. 
In  the  third  generation  moral  imbecility  or  idiocy,  with  or 
■without  corresponding  intellectual  infirmity.  This  sort  of 
ideal  scheme  -will  serve  to  mark  the  main  line  of  the  course 
of  degeneration,  which  may,  however,  be  modified  greatly  ia 
particular  cases ;  for  as,  on  the  one  hand,  the  second  stage 
may  be  omitted  altogether,  and  by  an  unpropitious  reinforce- 
ment of  the  bad  tendencies,  through  the  meeting  of  two  de- 
generate lines,  the  third  follow  directly  upon  the  first;  so 
on  the  other  hand,  owing  to  the  combinations,  neutralisations 
and  other  modifications  to  which  ample  scope  and  occasion 
are  given  by  the  introduction  of  the  elements  of  a  fresh  stock 
in  each  generation,  and  to  the  inherent  tendency  which  there 
is  in  every  organism  to  revert  to  a  sound  type,  the  outcome 
of  the  degeneracy  may  be  delayed,  modified,  or  hindered  alto- 
gether. This  broad  lesson,  however,  remains  for  us — namely, 
that  the  acquired  infirmity  of  one  generation  will,  unless  coun- 
tervailing influences  of  breed,  of  training,  or  of  surroundings 
are  brought  to  bear  meanwhile,  become  the  natural  defici- 
ence  of  a  succeeding  generation  :  it  is  the  old  tale,  as  old  as 
history,  that  when  the  fathers  have  eaten  sour  grapes  the 
children's  teeth  are  set  on  edge.  Most  certain  it  is  that  men 
are  not  bred  well  or  ill  by  accident,  little  as  they  reck  of  it 
in  practice,  any  more  than  are  the  animals  the  select  breed- 
ing of  which  they  make  such  a  careful  study ;  that  there  are 
laws  of  hereditary  action  working  definitely  in  direct  trans- 
mission of  qualities,  or  indirectly  through  combinations  and 
repulsions,  neutralisations  and  modifications  of  qualities  ;  and 
that  it  is  by  virtue  of  these  laws  determining  the  moral  and 
physical  constitution  of  every  individual  that  a  good  result 
ensues  in  one  case,  a  bad  result  in  another. 

Of  many  striking  examples  of  deprivation  or  derange- 
ment of  moral  feeling  and  will  in  young  persons  that  might 
be  given,  let  one  suffice  here :  that  of  a  rather  sharp-looking 
boy,  eight  years  of  age  when  I  saw  him,  who,  however,  had 
not  been  able  to  learn  anything  systematically ;  not  even  a 
game  of  play,  since  to  play  with  a  hoop  exacted  more  atten- 
tion and  perseverance  than  he  had  been  able  to  give.  In 
fact  he  could  not  hold  his  attention  to  anything,  though 


CONGENITAL  DEITCTS  OF  WILL.  249 

very  quick  in  instant  perception.  He  was,  however,  most 
ingenious  in  mischief  which  he  never  missed  an  opportunity 
of  doing,  and  delighted  to  talk  of  playing  some  viciously 
mischievous  trick,  in  the  imaginative  description  of  which  he 
exulted  in  a  braggart  and  grotesquely  dramatic  fashion ; 
chattering  incessantly  and  running  from  subject  to  subject, 
without  other  connection  than  the  unity  of  character  given 
to  them  by  the  leading  bent  of  his  destructive  disposition. 
Though  he  could  tell  stories  of  the  events  and  even  minute 
experiences  of  years  back  with  surprising  exactness  of  details, 
he  had  no  perception  of  truth,  but  evinced  an  inexhaustible 
and  uncontrollable  craving  for  what  might  have  been  called 
lying,  had  his  nature  been  in  the  least  sensible  to  truth,  but 
what  were  really  the  constructions  of  a  vivid  and  busy  ima- 
gination revelling  in  its  vicious  activity.  His  continual  talk 
was  of  killing  persons  or  animals  that  had  in  any  way  offended 
him  or  ruffled  his  prodigious  conceit ;  and  he  was  ludicrously 
ferocious  and  boastful  in  his  dramatic  conceptions  and  cir- 
cumstantial descriptions  of  the  grand  way  in  which  he  would 
do  it.  His  father  had  died  of  what  was  called  softening  of 
the  brain  soon  after  he  was  forty  years  old,  having  been  insane 
for  some  time  before  his  death ;  his  paternal  grandmother 
had  died  demented  in  an  asylum  at  a  great  age,  having  lived 
there  for  upwards  of  twenty  years ;  on  his  mother's  side  also 
there  was  insanity,  and  she  herself,  though  not  actually 
insane,  was  extremely  excitable  and  a  singularly  insincere 
and  shifty-minded  person.  What  wonder  then  that  a  con- 
ge nitally  defective  moral  organisation  was  the  term  of  that 
line  of  descent !  The  creature  was  degenerate  before  it  was 
generate. 

It  will  not  be  amiss  to  take  particular  notice  of  the  three 
prominent  phenomena  of  his  mental  pathology :  first,  a  com- 
plete absence  of  any  germ  of  moral  sense,  his  asocial  nature 
in  that  respect,  whence  no  response  to  the  higher  social 
stimuli  and  no  capacity  to  assimilate  them— that  is,  to  take 
and  make  them  into  its  own  nature;  secondly,  his  congenital 
inability  to  apply  his  attention  steadily  so  as  to  get  a  proper 
hold  or  apprehension  of  external  realities  and  their  relations 
— a  fatal  defect,  for  the  monkey  is  not  teachable  that  cannot 


250  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

attend,  and  the  monkey  most  teachable  that  attends  the 
best;  thirdly,  an  extraordinarily  active  display  of  the  con- 
structive energy  of  brain  that  we  call  imagination,  unin- 
formed by  lessons  of  experience  which  it  could  not  properly 
assimilate,  and  ill  inspired  by  the  vicious  mood  of  his  men- 
tal nature,  whose  energies  it  absorbed  into  its  predominant 
and  almost  exclusive  activity.  Clearly  the  vital  energy  of 
the  stock,  even  in  the  higher  expressions  of  it  in  the  nei-vous 
system,  were  not  exhausted,  had  other  defects  not  precluded 
its  proper  development.  Though  an  extreme  instance,  it 
may  serve  to  teach  what  little  value  is  to  be  set  on  imaginar- 
tion  when  it  is  uninformed  by  observation  and  undisciplined 
by  reason. 

A  second  question  that  is  of  scientific  interest  in  cases  of 
the  kind  is  how  it  happens  that  creatures  so  young  are  cap- 
able of  displaying  so  extraordinary  a  sexual  precocity  as  they 
do  sometimes.  Those  who  observe  it  with  dismay  are  apt  to 
be  painfully  shocked  by  the  spectacle  and  to  cry  out  against 
it  as  if  it  were  not  human.  But  it  is  human  enough.  If 
the  true  problem  be,  as  it  certainly  is,  not  the  origin  of  evil, 
but  the  origin  of  good  in  mankind,  the  products  of  the  de- 
generation of  the  kind  may  be  expected  naturally  to  exhibit 
disintegrate  displays  of  its  fundamental  egoistic  passions. 
In  what  modes  else  could  the  decomposition  or  disintegration 
of  human  nature  show  itself?  Were  the  infant  in  arms 
possessed  of  power  answering  in  measure  to  the  outbursts  of 
its  transitory  passions,  had  it  a  giant's  strength  in  its  feeble 
limbs  to  execute  its  froward  will  when  it  goes  into  contor- 
tions of  rage  because  it  does  not  like  to  be  washed,  it  would 
be  as  dangerous  and  destructive  as  any  madman :  it  is  the 
helplessness  of  its  body  which,  rendering  it  impotent,  makes 
it  innocent.  It  is  well  to  idealise,  but  it  is  not  necessary  to 
suffer  the  brightness  of  the  ideal  wholly  to  obscure  the  real, 
and  it  is  not  well  therefore  to  take  quite  seriously  the  vast 
deal  of  nonsense  that  is  written  concerning  the  purity  and 
innocence  of  childhood  ;  the  purity  is  a  negative  purity  at 
best,  a  blank  virtue,  while  the  activities  that  exist  are  for 
the  most  part  not  innocent.  Are  not  children,  as  La  Bruyere 
described    them,   naturally    boastful,    scornful,   passionate. 


CONGENITAL  DEFECTS  OF  WILL.  251 

envious,  curious,  selfish,  idle,  prone  to  steal,  apt  at  dissimu- 
lation, and  ready  liars ;  easily  moved  to  immoderate  joy  or 
thrown  into  excessive  grief  by  trifles ;  not  willing  themselves 
to  suffer  but  eager  and  pleased  to  inflict  suffering  ?  It  is  a 
description  that  would  suit  well  for  savages  in  a  low  state  of 
civilisation,  though  no  one  would  be  vehemently  eager  to 
ascribe  purity  and  innocence  to  them. 

Take  away  from  a  young  child's  mind  the  germs  of  those 
highest  inhibitory  functions  that  are  presupposed  by  a  poten- 
tiality of  moral  development,  and  you  leave  the  natural  pas- 
sions and  instincts  free  play;  not  the  fundamental  instincts 
of  animal  nature  only,  but  the  secondary  or  acquired  egoistic 
passions  into  which,  in  a  complex  social  state  with  its  dif- 
ferenced interests  and  pursuits,  the  primary  instincts  have 
undergone  development.  To  lie,  to  counterfeit,  to  deceive, 
to  envy,  to  hate,  to  steal,  to  devise  cunning  means  to  gratify 
sense  or  interest  are  human  enough  qualities ;  everybody 
may,  I  suppose,  be  said  truly  to  be  a  potential  liar,  a  poten- 
tial thief,  a  potential  adulterer,  even  a  potential  murderer, 
since  whatever  sinner  any  man  has  been  every  man  needs 
to  pray  that  he  may  not  be ;  and  therefore  it  is  natural  that 
the  congenitally  unsound  or  defective  individual  inherits  and 
displays  some  of  these  potentialities,  more  or  fewer  according 
to  the  degree  and  variety  of  degeneration  that  he  represents. 
It  is  because  its  kind  is  in  it,  mutilated,  fragmentary,  disin- 
tegrated, and  the  more  special  evolution  of  kind  which  con- 
stitutes its  family-nature,  that  the  morally  imbecile  child 
sometimes  shows  startling  immoral  aptitudes,  and  talents 
in  vice  that  certainly  could  never  have  been  acquired  by  it  j 
any  more  than  the  sexual  movements  which  it  may  perform 
with  surprising  skill  could  have  been  voluntarily  devised  and 
performed  by  it,  or  are  voluntarily  devised  and  performed  by 
any  one.  The  degrees  and  varieties  of  moral  and  intellectual 
defect  will,  of  course,  be  as  many  as  the  degrees  and  forms 
of  the  degeneracy.  In  the  lowest  examples  of  all  there  will 
scarcely  be  a  clearly  expressed  instinct,  nothing  more  than 
the  uncertain  show  of  a  vague,  feeble  and  faltering  instinct 
of  self-conservation  not  reaching  beyond  the  mere  appetite 
for  food,  without  any  sense  of  the  means  to  gratify  it ;  at  a 


252  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

little  higher  level  you  shall  have  the  sexual  and  self-con- 
servative instincts  in  gross,  bestial,  and  perhaps  perverted 
display ;  and  at  a  higher  level  still,  with  the  social  egoistic 
instincts  in  pretty  full  activity,  there  will  be  an  entire 
absence  of  the  altruistic  instincts,  accompanied  it  may  be 
by  a  great  deal  of  cunning  intelligence.  From  all  which  it 
plainly  appears  that  in  the  downward  process  of  the  undoing 
of  the  human  nature  belonging  to  a  complex  social  develop- 
ment an  early  event  is  a  deprivation  or  a  depravation  of 
moral  feeling  and  will :  how  indeed  could  it  be  otherwise  if, 
as  I  have  previously  argued,  the  altruistic  impulse  is  formed 
out  of  the  social  fusion  and  transmutation  of  the  egoistic 
impulses  ? 

Another  proof,  were  other  proof  necessary,  of  the  in- 
nate fixity  of  immoral  or  anti-social  potentialities,  and  of  the 
less  fixed  and  stable  nature  of  moral  instinct,  is  that  moral 
action  in  any  of  its  modes  is  not  an  absolute  instinct  in  any 
person ;  there  is  always  the  consciousness  of,  sometimes  the 
glance  at,  and  oftentimes  the  resisted  inclination  to  the 
opposite  course ;  at  any  rate  there  is  not  the  instant,  direct, 
blind,  unquestioning  obedience  to  an  instinct  that  there  is 
in  a  man's  walking  upright.  No  one  in  walking  seems  to 
entertain  the  notion  of  going  on  all  fours,  but  the  mind  of 
the  most  chaste  and  virtuous  man  alive  is  invaded  sometimes 
by  the  intrusive  thought  of  adultery  which  he  has  not  the 
least  intention  to  practise.  Let  a  man's  heart  overflow  with 
brotherly  love  to  his  kind,  it  is  still  sensible,  deep  in  it,  of 
occasional  pulses  intimating  that  at  bottom  men  naturally 
hate  one  another.  So  it  is  with  other  evil  imaginations  of 
the  heart.  Were  the  secrets  of  all  hearts  laid  open,  it 
would  be  a  strange  phantasmagoria  of  evil  thouglits  passing 
through  the  minds  of  the  best  of  men,  thoughts  that  they 
would  shrink  with  horror  from  letting  the  tongue  put  into 
words ;  many  times  no  more  than  vague,  half- formed,  fleet- 
ing fancies,  like  the  changing  shapes  of  drifting  clouds,  but 
sometimes  marshalled  by  busy  imagination  into  more  or  less 
vivid  and  coherent  tableaus  and  dramas,  without  exciting 
any  more  horror  than  similar  thoughts  do  in  dreams,  when 
we  break  all  the  ten  commandments  with  serene  equanimity. 


CONGENITAL  DEFECTS  OF  WILL.  253 

Why  not,  if  the  inspiration  of  tlie  moral  sense  be  at  bottom 
social  and  external?  Obviously,  when  the  supreme  inhibi- 
tory functions  are  suspended  or  destroyed,  high  reason  and 
will  dethroned,  these  hidden  and  subjected  tendencies  will, 
like  slaves  in  a  servile  rebellion,  come  turbulently  to  the 
front  and  disport  themselves  riotously. 

But  is  it  always  in  such  case  that  only  what  was 
unseen  is  now  unveiled  by  the  removal  of  the  restraint, 
or  is  there  sometimes  a  positive  growth  or  new  develop- 
ment of  vice  after  the  removal  ?  Was  all  that  evil  actually 
in  the  man  which  he  displays  when  reason  and  will  are 
dethroned  by  mental  derangement?  Was  your  sister  or 
brother  or  lover  whom  you  esteemed  as  a  model  of  virtuous 
innocence,  and  against  the  smallest  suspicion  of  whose 
purity  of  mind  you  would  have  indignantly  revolted,  really 
so  degraded  a  creature,  and  you  knew  it  not?  No,  not 
so :  the  germs  of  immoral  tendencies  were  there,  as  they 
are  in  all  persons,  but  they  grew  and  underwent  patho- 
logical development  by  mutual  interaction  after  the  over- 
throw of  reason  and  will,  not  otherwise  than  as  they  disport 
themselves  in  new  functional  activities  of  a  transient  kind 
during  dreams.  After  dissociation  of  mental  elements  there 
takes  place  the  association  of  congenial  elements  of  the  dis- 
sociate products.  Psychologists  have  a  good  deal  to  learn  yet 
before  they  apprehend  adequately  the  purely  organic  con- 
structive energies  of  the  brain  for  good  or  ill  that  lie  beneath 
consciousness  and  do  that  which  we  are  conscious  of  only  in 
the  result ;  by  virtue  of  which  it  is  that  just  as  the  sound 
mental  organisation  when  exposed  to  wholesome  influences 
developes  in  higher  thoughts  and  imaginations,  so  the  un- 
sound mental  organisation  which  is  incapable  of  wholesome 
assimilation  developes  in  morbid  thoughts  and  impulses  and 
imaginings.  It  is  the  lower  nature  in  the  man  asserting  its 
autonomy,  so  to  speak,  in  a  rapid  degenerative  growth  when 
the  control  of  the  higher  nature  is  withdrawn.  The  concep- 
tion and  execution  of  a  new  degradation  by  any  one  is  not 
more  bodily  nor  less  mental  than  the  conception  and  execu- 
tion of  a  great  invention  or  of  a  great  work  of  art ;  only  in 
the  former  case  it  is  the  energy  of  degeneration,  in  the  latter 


254  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

case  the  energy  of  development.  To  ask  that  the  morbid 
mind  should  stay  at  a  certain  level  of  degeneracy  and  cease 
to  display  new  morbid  functions  would  be  very  much  like 
asking  that  a  morbid  growth  amid  healthy  structures  should 
not  increase  and  undergo  its  own  changes  independently  of 
them  ;  or  to  ask  that  the  physiologically  inco-ordinate  move- 
ments of  convulsions  should  forbear  to  have  any  pathological 
co-ordination  whatever.  Not  to  exercise  and  to  grow  to  the 
exercise  of  one's  better  nature,  is  to  exercise  and  to  grow  to 
the  exercise  of  one's  worse  nature. 

Were  anybody  to  observe  carefully  what  goes  on  in  his 
mind  during  waking,  he  would  perceive  that  it  was  the 
theatre  of  as  many  fantastic,  grotesque,  incoherent  thoughts 
as  in  dreams;  but  they  are  fleeting  and  not  attended  to, 
because  consciousness  is  fixed  on  the  events  and  interests  of 
real  life,  whereas  in  dreams  they  are  solely  active,  usurp 
what  consciousness  there  is,  and  so  become  more  or  less 
dramas.  Obviously  it  will  depend  much  on  the  occupation 
that  each  one  gives  his  mind,  and  on  the  habits  of  attention 
and  thought  that  he  has  trained  it  to,  how  large  a  part  these 
incoherent  vagaries  of  thought  and  imagination  shall  play  in 
his  waking  mind,  and  indeed  in  some  measure  even  in  his 
dreams  also.  Were  men  ordinarily  in  the  habit  of  thinking 
coherently,  as  they  fondly  flatter  themselves  they  are,  were 
they  not  actually  dreaming  during  more  than  half  their  wak- 
ing lives,  their  very  dreams  would  be  a  great  deal  more  co- 
herent than  they  are  now.  The  incoherences  of  ordinary 
dreams  are  no  more  than  stronger  instances  of  the  incohe- 
rences of  the  ordinary  thoughts  of  most  persons.  By  the 
habitual  practice  of  accurate  observation  and  reflection  when 
awake,  owing  to  the  engagement  of  the  attention  in  the  steady 
pursuit  of  some  line  of  systematic  study,  the  dreams  that  take 
place  become  less  incoherent,  are  indeed  sometimes  entirely 
coherent,  and  a  happy  thought  perhaps  occurs  that  one 
gladly  retains  on  waking.  Now  if  it  be  thus  possible  by 
good  and  regular  exercise  of  the  higher  faculties  of  mind  to 
gain  some  mastery  over  thought  in  dreams,  how  much  more 
is  it  within  our  power  and  shown  to  be  our  duty  to  obtain 
and  exercise  dominion  over  the  vain  and  evil  thoughts,  in- 


r 


CONGENITAL  DEFECTS  OF  WILL.  255 

clinations  and  imaginings  of  tlie  day,  and  so  to  hinder  their 
luxuriant  growth ! 

Before  passing  from  the  consideration  of  the  nature  and 
meaning  of  moral  imbecility  and  of  its  obvious  lessons,  it 
■will  not  perhaps  be  amiss  to  state  that  the  idiot  must  of  ne- 
cessity be  essentially  an  anti-social  being,  passive  or  active, 
according  to  the  degree  and  character  of  his  congenital  de- 
privation: active  and  anti-social  when  he  displays  vicious 
desires  and  tendencies,  as  the  moral  idiot  does ;  passive  and 
asocial  when,  by  reason  of  a  deeper  and  more  general  depriva- 
tion of  mind,  he  is  capable  of  little  more  than  a  vegetative 
life.  In  the  latter  case,  the  organs  by  which  he  should  make 
sensible  acquaintance  with  the  external  world  and  react  to 
its  impressions  upon  him,  so  as  to  apprehend  it  justly,  are 
manifestly  defective.  The  dulness  of  sensibility,  more  or  less 
evident  in  all  idiots,  is  very  remarkable  in  some :  witness  the 
new-born  idiotic  infant  that  hardly  feels  at  all  and  shows  no 
instinct  to  find  and  little  power  to  touch  and  grasp  the 
mother's  nipple  when  it  is  put  to  the  breast ;  or  that  older 
idiot  at  the  Earlswood  Asylum  that  sat  smiling  at  its  ease 
while  its  toenail  was  torn  off.'  As  one  would  expect,  moral 
insensibility  is  more  common  and  more  complete  among 
them  than  insensibility  to  pain  :  take  as  instance  the  idiot 
mentioned  by  Morel  who,  being  accustomed  to  assist  at  the 
funerals  in  the  asylum  of  which  he  was  an  inmate,  and  to 
be  rewarded  for  his  services  on  each  occasion  with  a  little 
tobacco,  killed  another  patient  during  a  long  dearth  of  deaths 
in  order  that  there  might  be  a  funeral ;  or  an  imbecile  boy 
I  saw  in  an  asylum  on  one  occasion  who  had  all  but  succeeded 
in  strangling  an  idiot  child,  giving  no  other  reason  for  his  act 
than  that  he  'thought  he'd  put  him  out  of  his  misery.'  This 
boy  was  not  entirely  devoid  of  intelligence,  as  the  cool  motive 
of  his  act  showed;  moreover,  he  could  read  and  write  a  little, 
and  do  a  simple  calculation ;  and  when  he  was  asked  the 
question  he  acknowledged  that  what  he  had  done  was  wrong 
and  that  he  should  not  like  to  be  treated  so  himself,  his 
vacantly  smiling  face  assuming  for  the  moment  a  caricature- 
like seriousness  and  then  relapsing  into  empty  giggle.     His 

*  Mentioned  by  Dr.  Grabham,  late  Superintendent  of  that  Asylum. 


256  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

admission  that  it  was  wrong  was  plainly  the  mere  parrot-like 
repetition  of  words  of  the  meaning  of  which  he  had  no  real 
feeling.  Many  times  the  idiot  is  not  less  deficient  in  powers 
of  motor  reaction  than  he  is  in  sensibility  to  impressions,  so 
that  in  extreme  cases  he  is  quite  unable  to  build  up  in  him- 
self any  conception  of  the  external  world,  and  unable  in  any 
case  to  build  up  an  adequate  conception  of  it.  And  aptly  do 
the  sluggish  muscles  of  his  expressionless  face  betray  his 
mental  vacancy :  for  as  it  is  through  the  eye  mainly  that  we 
take  in  or  apprehend  the  world,  so  it  is  through  the  eye  that 
the  world  as  we  have  apprehended  it  looks  out ;  or,  speaking 
more  correctly,  as  it  is  through  the  muscular  system  that  the 
external  world  is  built  up  in  us,  so  the  world  as  it  has  been 
built  up  is  expressed  in  the  whole  bodily  features  as  they 
have  been  moulded  by  the  fit  muscular  actions  of  habitual 
internal  states.  He  is  a  poor  medical  psychologist  who  can- 
not see  idiocy  in  the  walk  as  well  in  the  talk  of  his  patient ; 
and  he  will  be  a  very  expert  psychologist  in  time  to  come 
who  shall  read  a  full  knowledge  of  the  whole  character  of 
any  individual  in  his  gait,  carriage,  conformation,  features 
and  look.  With  that  reflection  I  take  leave  of  th6  idiot. 
Placed,  as  he  is,  in  the  midst  of  a  complex  social  develop- 
ment, without  the  faculties  to  feel  and  to  respond  to  the 
many  and  special  complex  and  refined  relations  of  his  sur- 
roundings, he  is  necessarily  a  being  apart,  isolated,  as  his 
name  {IStoyrijs)  implies ;  and  if  he  has  any  active  tendencies 
they  are  such  as,  being  inspired  grossly  by  the  self-conserva- 
tive instinct  generally,  or  by  the  sexual  instinct  sometimes, 
are  likely  to  bring  him  into  trouble. 


SECTION  III. 

DEGENERATION   OF   MORAL   FEELING   AND   "WILL   IN   DISEASE. 

Continuing  our  studies  in  moral  pathology,  the  next  fact  to 
claim  notice  is  that  degenerative  disease  will  impair  or 
destroy  moral  feeling,  leaving  the  person  as  destitute  in 
that  respect  as  if  he  were  without  the  capacity  of  moral 
feeling  in  consequence  of  congenitally  defective  organisation. 
Of  nervous  disorders  that  affect  mental  function  hysteria  is 
perhaps  that  which  furnishes  the  strangest  and  most 
grotesque  examples  of  depravation  of  moral  feeling  and 
will.  It  is  not  merely  that  hysterical  women,  without 
deliberate  consciousness  on  their  part,  simulate  different 
diseases  so  closely  that  it  is  many  times  hard  and  sometimes 
impossible  to  say  whether  they  have  them  or  not,  deceiving 
themselves  and  others,  but  in  ext  ^ner  cases  of  moral  per- 
version they  wilfully  and  designedly  fabricate  diseases  and 
inflict  long  and  painful  sufferings  on  themselves  in  carrying 
the  deception  through.  To  this  class  of  half  deceived  and 
half  deceiving  impostors  belong  the  ecstatics  or  stigmatics 
who  fall  into  periodical  trances  from  which  they  awake  with 
blood  oozing  from  the  palms  of  the  hands  and  from  the  skin 
of  the  forehead,  in  imitation  of  the  bleedings  of  Jesus 
Christ  from  the  nails  that  were  driven  through  his  hands 
and  the  crown  of  thorns  that  was  set  on  his  head,  they 
having  secretly  pricked  themselves  with  a  needle  or  pin 
during  the  supposed  unconsciousness ;  the  fasting  girls  who 
profess  to  live  without  food,  which  they  contrive  to  get 
secretly  themselves  or  to  have  secretly  conveyed  to  them ; 
the  paralytics  who  keep  their  beds  for  years  or  are  wheeled 
about  in  Bath  chairs,  when  they  have  no  other  paralysis 
than  that  of  will  and  could  rise  and  walk  at  any  moment  if 
a  strong  enough  motive  were  brought  to  bear  upon  them ; 
the  hystero-epileptics  who  fall  instantly  into  and  out  of  the 
proper  convulsions  or  the  proper  trances  when  the  proper 
stimulus  is  applied ;  those  women  again  who  drop  acids  on 
their  arms  or  on  other  parts  of  the  body  for  the  purpose  of 


258  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

fabricating  extraordinary  skin-diseases,  or  who  blacken  their 
eyelids  in  order  to  keep  up  the  appearances  of  an  illness 
•which  they  feign,  or  are  afflicted  with  a  blindness  or  a 
speechlessness  that  vanishes  with  the  restoration  of  moral 
sanity  and  will ;  and  many  other  similar  cases  too  numerous 
to  mention. 

If  these  persons  are  removed  from  the  conditions  of 
life  in  which  their  maladies  had  origin  and  afterwards  grew 
to  their  present  habits  in  response  to  the  attention  and 
sympathy  bestowed  upon  them — the  conditions,  that  is  to 
say,  to  which  their  perverted  moral  natures  have  definitely 
adjusted  themselves;  and  if  they  are  placed  in  new  sur- 
roundings where  the  social  impressions  are  different  and 
they  feel  they  have  no  fitly  sympathetic  audience  to  act  to, 
but  on  the  contrary  find  themselves  in  presence  of  fit  and 
firm  moral  influences  brought  steadily  to  bear  upon  them ; 
they  speedily  begin  to  make  more  wholesome  adjustments 
and  so  regain  their  true  moral  tone  and  their  natural  power 
of  will.  For  them,  as  a  rule,  the  sympathy  and  interest  of 
their  family  and  friends  are  the  most  favourable  audience, 
and  therefore  the  most  unfavourable  environments,  since  they 
supply  social  sanction  and  support  to  the  unmoral  imperative 
of  their  perverted  natures.  Meanwhile  the  endurance  they 
show  in  inflicting  pain  on  themselves  and  in  keeping  up  the 
more  or  less  wilful  deception,  and  the  perverted  pleasure 
that  they  feel  in  harassing  their  friends  with  the  alarm  and 
anxieties  that  they  occasion  them,  are  a  signal  testimony  to 
the  essential  part  which  the  social  medium  has  in  the  con- 
stitution of  the  individual's  nature ;  for  in  no  case  would 
they  be  so  afflicted  had  they  not  a  sympathetic  medium.  It 
is  impossible  to  conceive  hysteria  attacking  one  who  was 
not  a  social  being,  or  one  again  who,  Eobinson  Crusoe-like, 
was  planted  alone  on  an  uninhabited  island.  Their  example 
proves  also  how  the  derangement  of  the  social  sense  leads 
naturally  and  inevitably  to  a  deterioration  of  moral  feeling 
and  will :  it  is  demoralisation  following  desocialisation. 

Another  lesson  we  cannot  help  learning  from  them  ia 
how  helpless  a  purely  psychological  theory  leaves  us  in  a 
case  where  it  suffices  not  to  have  only  words  that  sound 


MOEAL  FEELING  AND  WILL  IN  DISEASE.  259 

ratlier  than  signify;  for  assuredly  it  yields  not,  nor  even 
pretends  to  yield,  the  least  explanation  of  the  impairment  of 
will — how  it  has  come  about,  what  are  its  nature  and  extent, 
and  how  it  is  to  be  got  rid  of.  Is  it  that  the  will's  essence 
is  affected,  or  is  it  that,  perfectly  pure  and  unimpaired 
itself,  its  manifestations  are  hindered  and  lamed  by 
obstructed  nerve-paths?  Are  we  to  look  upon  the  will 
itself  as  in  fault,  or  are  we  to  look  compassionately  upon  a 
faultless  will  struggling  in  vain  with  a  defective  instru- 
ment? The  psychologist  of  the  study  does  not  trouble 
himself  to  answer  in  that  matter,  but  the  medical  psycho- 
logist who  has  to  deal  practically  with  disorders  of  will  and 
to  bring  them  back  to  order,  if  possible,  cannot  pass  the 
question  by :  he  must  do  as  mankind  with  consistent  incon- 
sistency have  always  done  actually,  in  spite  of  their  theory 
of  the  spiritual  separateness  of  will — treat  its  derangements 
through  the  body  exactly  as  if  it  were  entirely  dependent  on 
the  body,  product  not  prime  mover. 

In  order  not  to  delude  himself  with  words  that  mark  no 
definite  ideas,  but  to  have  substantial  meaning  in  the  terms 
he  uses,  he  must  learn  to  fall  back  upon  the  physiological 
conception  of  a  number  of  confederated  nerve-centres,  co- 
ordinate and  sub-ordinate,  as  the  physical  substrata  of  all 
mental  functions.  To  him,  as  he  then  conceives  matters, 
the  just  co-ordination  of  these  confederated  centres  will  be 
seen  to  be  the  essential  condition  of  will,  and  the  completest 
co-ordination  the  condition  of  the  best  will ;  which  nowise 
therefore  predetermines  and  effects  the  process,  as  the 
common  illusion  is,  but  by  its  being  marks  and  attests  the 
accomplishment  thereof.  Now  in  these  hysterical  persons, 
whose  extreme  mobility  of  nature  shows  itself  at  the  best 
of  times  by  rapid  transitions  of  moods,  notions,  and  caprices 
according  to  the  different  impressions  which  they  undergo, 
there  is  a  certain  instability  in  the  confederation  of  nerve- 
centres;  that  is  to  say,  instead  of  being  bound  together 
firmly  in  compact  association  these  are  prone  to  easy  dis- 
sociation in  consequence  of  moderate  disturbance,  whether 
moral  or  physical,  and  to  take  on  more  or  less  separate 
action.     It  is  such  dissociate  function  that  is  the  disinte- 


260  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

gration  of  "will  and  the  desocialisation  of  the  individual. 
Any  one  who  is  brought  under  the  dominion  of  the  pre- 
dominant or  exclusive  activity  of  one  of  these  centres  or  of 
an  allied  group  of  them,  the  functions  of  the  rest  being 
inhibited  and  perhaps  almost  completely  suspended  for  the 
time,  is  necessarily  an  incomplete  and  changed  being ; 
not  an  integrate  self  but  absorbed  as  self  in  the  special  and 
partial  function,  and  insensible  therefore  to  those  relations 
to  which  the  other  centres  separately  or  in  the  imperial 
union  of  the  whole  minister:  mentally  disintegrate  and 
therefore  morally  deteriorate.  The  consensus  gone,  the  con- 
science goes  with  it.  The  condition  of  things  is  of  the  same 
kind  as,  though  much  less  deep  in  degree  than,  that  which 
seems  to  exist,  reaching  its  climax,  in  such  discontinuous 
mental  states  as  hypnotism,  somnambulism,  catalepsy  and 
other  allied  disorders. 

Similar  considerations  will  apply  to  those  hysterical  con- 
ditions, not  calling  for  description  here,  in  which  socially 
morbid  impulses  are  exhibited  sometimes  by  young  women 
— especially  when  they  are  somewhat  weak-minded,  or  have 
inherited  a  distinct  predisposition  to  mental  derangement — 
who  have  lately  passed  through  the  physiological  changes  oi 
puberty :  for  example,  impulses  to  steal,  to  set  fire  to  houses, 
to  make  false  accusations  of  indecent  assaults,  and  even 
sometimes  to  kill.  When,  in  consequence  of  those  changes, 
the  newly  awakened  functions  of  the  reproductive  organs 
come  into  action  and  enter  into  the  mental  life  through  their 
representative  centres  in  the  brain,  they  produce  a  commo- 
tion there  which  is  the  commencement  of  a  revolution  of  the 
entire  mental  being ;  and  if  the  nerve-centres  are  unstable,  it 
easily  happens  that  their  equilibrium  is  overthrown,  and  that 
instead  of  compactly  associate  function  of  the  whole,  a  dis- 
sociate and  predominant  function  of  one  centre  or  group  of 
centres  is  set  up. 

The  odd  thing  from  the  psychological  point  of  view  is  that 
all  these  hysterical  persons  are  cured  best  by  moral  means ; 
that  a  vigorous  moral  shock  or  a  suitable  moral  discipline  is 
the  most  effective  agent  that  can  be  applied ;  that  the  physical 
disorder  of  the  confederate  centres  is  removed  and  the  unity 


MORAL  FEELING  AND  WILL  IN  DISEASE.  261 

of  their  function  restored  by  operating  upon  that  spiritual 
agent  in  the  background  which,  according  to  the  psycholo- 
gical theory,  has  no  point  of  contact  or  relation  with  them. 
Always,  however,  is  the  psychologist  willing,  notwithstanding 
his  theory  of  their  absolute  separateness,  to  admit  the  power 
of  mind  over  body  more  readily  than  the  power  of  body  over 
mind:  it  is  only  in  the  one  direction  that  he  desires  the 
great  gulf  which  he  places  between  them  to  be  impassable. 
From  the  physiological  point  of  view  it  is  not  strange  at  all 
that  the  social  nature  incorporate  in  the  individual  nature 
responds  to  the  proper  social  stimuli,  and  that  when  the 
dormant  or  suspended  energies  of  the  inhibited  centres  are 
aroused  the  energy  of  the  predominantly  active  centre  is 
withdrawn  or  inhibited;  the  excitation  of  a  neighbouring 
centre  is  the  diversion  of  energy  from  the  active  centre ;  the 
restoration  of  the  normal  equilibrium  the  destruction  of  the 
morbid  equilibrium. 

Another  disease  which  effaces  moral  feeling  temporarily, 
and  even  shatters  moral  character  sometimes,  especially  in 
young  children,  is  epilepsy.  Somehow,  though  we  cannot 
tell  how,  the  exquisitely  fine  and  complex  organisation  of 
nerve-structure  is  damaged  by  the  intense  molecular  com- 
motion which  is  the  condition  of  the  epileptic  explosion. 
Perhaps  it  is  that  the  fine  nervous  substrata  of  this  supreme 
organisation  are  so  exhausted  by  the  discharge,  the  principal 
trait  of  which  is  the  violation  or  the  abolition  of  normal  co- 
ordination, that  they  are  unable  immediately,  and  in  some 
cases  ever,  to  recover  their  inhibitive  powers  and  so  to  take 
their  proper  part  in  the  co-ordinations  and  sub-ordinations 
of  function.  It  is  in  that  case  a  sort  of  paralysis  of  function 
following  convulsion.  Undoubtedly  it  has  happened  that  a 
child's  conscience  has  been  as  clean  effaced  after  a  succes- 
sion of  epileptic  convulsions  as  the  memory  is  effaced  some- 
times in  like  manner ;  and  in  that  case  the  child  is  made  by 
morbid  art  very  much  like  the  child  that  is  by  nature  con- 
genitally  destitute  of  moral  sense.  Those  who  see  much  of 
epilepsy  are  witnesses  of  equally  remarkable  moral  transfor- 
mations in  connection  with  the  seizures  in  the  adult ;  the 
changes  either  preceding  or  following  the  fits  or  in  some 


262  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

instances  occurring  in  their  stead.  Looking  first  on  this 
and  then  on  that  picture  of  the  person  in  the  two  states,  it 
is  hard  to  realise  that  they  are  pictures  of  the  same  person. 
Perhaps  the  change  goes  no  deeper  than  an  exceeding  irri- 
tability and  suspicion  and  an  extreme  aptness  to  take  offence 
where  not  the  least  offence  was  meant  or  given,  but  in  other 
instances  it  is  so  great  as  to  amount  almost  to  a  transforma- 
tion of  character :  suspicion,  surliness,  indolence,  irascibility, 
and  a  disposition  to  false  accusations  and  vicious  deeds 
taking  the  place  of  candour,  amiability,  good  temper,  an 
obliging  disposition  and  gentle  behaviour.  Happily  the 
abrupt  change  is  mostly  a  passing  phase :  it  might  be  com- 
pared well  to  that  which  takes  place  when  a  clear  and 
cloudless  sky  is  overcast  suddenly  with  dark  and  threatening 
thunder-clouds ;  and  just  as  the  darkened  sky  is  cleared  by 
the  thunderstorm  which  it  portends,  so  the  gloomy  moral 
perturbation  is  discharged  sometimes  by  the  epileptic  fit  or 
fits,  and  the  mental  atmosphere  cleared,  the  patient  returning 
soon  to  his  natural  character.  Not  always,  however:  for 
the  effect  of  a  continued  epilepsy,  especially  in  children,  may 
be  a  permanent  deterioration  of  moral  character ;  the  func- 
tional impairment,  when  unremoved,  lapsing  by  degrees  into 
structural  impairment.  Be  that  as  it  may,  the  fact  is  plain 
that  a  physical  cause  of  some  kind,  deranging  the  fine,  in- 
tricate, and  probably  unstable  organisation  which  subserves 
the  highest  functions  of  mind — those,  namely,  of  moral  feel- 
ing and  will,  abolishes  temporarily  those  functions. 

A  similar  derangement  of  moral  feeling  and  will  may 
follow  the  shock  of  an  attack  of  acute  mania  in  a  young 
person  of  fourteen  or  fifteen  years  of  age,  especially  if  it  be 
in  a  person  who,  inheriting  a  predisposition  to  insanity, 
has  unstable  nerve-centres.  The  order  of  events  is  in  this 
wise :  after  the  abatement  of  the  acute  excitement  there  is 
apparent  recovery,  for  the  intellect  regains  its  clearness  and 
sharpness  in  the  ordinary  relations  of  life,  but  there  is  not  a 
concomitant  return  to  the  normal  moral  character ;  on  the 
contrary,  a  persisting  moral  alienation  shows  itself  in  ex- 
treme self-conceit,  impudence,  indolence,  deceit,  wilfulness, 
even  violence ;  therewith  a  complete  moral  insusceptibility. 


MOEAL  FEELING  AND  WILL  IN  DISEASE.  263 

SO  that,  tliough  knowing  right  from  wrong  well  enough,  he 
is  not  impressional  to  good  influence,  likes  and  does  the 
wrong,  and  evinces  no  desire  to  suit  his  conduct  to  his  know- 
ledge. The  social  self  in  him  is  extinguished.  A  plain 
proof  this,  if  proof  were  necessary,  that  a  keen  intellectual 

■  apprehension  of  right  and  wrong  is  useless  to  generate  a 
B     good  will  without  the  inspiring  and  driving  force  of  good 

■  feeling.  In  any  case  there  is  very  little  altruistic  feeling  in 
y  the  mind  of  a  boy  or  girl  before  puberty,  for  which  reason 
W  an  alienation  of  mind  before  that  great  physiological  event 
w      has  taken  place  and  brought  about  its  resulting  evolution 

of  new  thought,  feeling  and  desire,  usually  presents  many 
features  of  moral  derangement ;  still  in  all  healthily  consti- 
tuted beings  of  civilised  parentage  there  is  a  certain  moral 
germ  or  capability  on  which  education  works  ;  and  that  it  is 
which  has  been  damaged  or  destroyed  by  the  storm  of  the 
mania.  The  interpretation  of  matters  is  something  of  this 
kind :  a  natural  instability  of  the  supreme  nerve-centres,  the 
ill-boding  gift  of  inheritance ;  easy  and  complete  overthrow 
of  their  unstable  equilibrium  in  the  excitement  of  the  mania, 
which  in  such  case  breaks  out  on  a  comparatively  slight  oc- 
casion and  passes  quickly  into  extreme  incoherence ;  incom- 
plete restoration  of  normal  stability  after  the  subsidence  of 
the  mental  storm;  a  consequent  impairment  or  extinction 
of  the  most  fine  inhibitive  functions,  which  means  an  in- 
capacity to  bring  the  highest  regulating  ideas  and  feelings 
to  bear  upon  the  lower  feelings  and  impulses. 

The  dissolution  of  the  union  of  the  federated  supreme 
nerve-centres  may  of  course  take  place  without  evident  statical 
or  structural  disorder — may,  that  is  to  say,  be  purely  func- 
tional in  the  first  instance ;  all  that  has  happened  is  that  a 
mental  equilibrium  somewhat  unstable  naturally  has  fallen 
into  a  temporarily  more  stable  equilibrium  of  an  abnormal  or 
morbid  kind.  In  all  forms  of  mental  derangement  there  are 
two  underlying  pathological  conditions:  the  one  dynamical, 
being  a  functional  dissociation  or  severance  of  the  nerve- 
centres  that  have  been  organised  to  act  together  physiologi- 
cally, whence  naturally  for  the  time  being  an  incoherence  of 
function  and  a  discontinuity  of  individual  being ;  the  other 


264  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

statical,  consisting  in  a  structural  change  in  the  nerve-cells 
or  in  their  uniting  fibre,  whence  a  permanent  disintegration 
of  the  substance  of  ideas.  The  physiological  order  of  de- 
velopment is  association  and  then  integration  of  ideas,  the 
pathological  order  of  degeneration  is  dissociation  and  then 
disintegration  of  them.  I  am  not  prepared  to  say  which 
condition  of  things  obtains  in  the  child  whose  moral  sense 
has  been  destroyed  by  an  attack  of  madness — whether,  that 
is  to  say,  the  main  trouble  is  an  interruption  of  the  bonds  of 
association,  a  dissolution  of  partnership,  so  to  speak,  or 
whether  some  minute  structural  change  in  the  nerve-elements 
that  no  microscope  can  detect  has  been  produced  ;  but  in  any 
case  the  former  condition,  in  which  patient  and  systematic 
training,  intellectual  and  moral,  might  work  a  cure,  is  obvi- 
ously a  less  serious  mischief  than  the  latter,  in  which  it  is 
hard  to  believe  that  a  cure  could  ever  be  effected.  Note  by 
the  way,  that  in  using  the  term  instability  of  mental  organ- 
isation one  may,  conformably  to  the  foregoing  theory  of 
pathology,  properly  distinguish  two  conditions  :  (a)  an  insta- 
bility of  the  association  or  federation  of  centres,  whereby 
they  are  prone  to  dissociate  function  ;  and  (6)  an  instability 
of  the  nervous  molecule  itself,  whereby  it  is  prone  to  easy 
explosion. 

There  are  other  conditions  occurring  in  connection  with 
the  development  of  the  reproductive  system  at  puberty  that 
may  occasion  a  good  deal  of  moral  disorder,  but  I  need  not 
discuss  them  here.  On  physiological  grounds  one  might 
venture  to  predict  that  to  eliminate  the  sexual  system  and 
its  intimate  and  essential  mental  workings  from  the  consti- 
tution of  human  nature,  would  be  to  eradicate  the  vital 
principle  of  morality,  of  poetic  and  artistic  emotion,  of  reli- 
gious feeling  among  mankind.  Eunuchs,  so  far  as  informa- 
tion about  them  goes,  lend  strong  support  to  the  opinion, 
since  they  are  for  the  most  part  deceitful,  liars,  cowardly, 
envious,  malignant,  destitute  of  social  and  moral  feeling, 
mutilated  in   mind   as  in  body ;  *  and  it   is,  I   think,  still 

'  '  Certainly  there  is  a  consent  between  the  body  and  the  mind  ;  and  where 
Nature  erreth  in  the  one,  she  ventureth  in  the  other.  Ubi  peccat  in  uno 
periditatur  in  altero.  .  .  .  Kings  in  ancient  times  (and  at  this  present  in  some 


k 


MORAL  FEELING  AND  WILL  IN  DISEASE.  265 

fiurther    strengthened   by  observation  of    tbe   mental  and 
moral  effects  of  the  development  of  the  reproductive  system 

;  at  puberty,  and  of  the  special  features  of  the  different  forms 
of  mental  derangement  that  occur  at  different  periods  of 
life.  What  then  shall  be  said  of  those  holy  men  of  old  of 
whom  we  are  told  that  they  made  themselves  eunuchs  for 
the  kingdom  of  heaven's  sake  ?  This  certainly :  that  they 
emasculated  virtue  in  order  to  escape  from  the  temptations 
of  vice ;  and  that  only  would  they  find  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  a  fitting  place  for  them  if  the  glorious  company  of 
angels,  apostles,  prophets,  and  holy  men  and  women  there 
were  moral  eunuchs.     In  our  dealings  with  physical  nature 

;      we  conquer  not  except  by  obeying ;  and  so  likewise  in  the 

^  conflict  of  the  passions  of  our  nature  it  is  necessary  to 
acknowledge  and  assimilate  their  true  force  and  character, 
and  so  to  get  the  best  use  of  them,  not  by  vain  and  foolish 
attempts  to  extinguish  them  as  mortal  enemies,  but  by  wise 
and  patient  efforts  to  turn  and  guide  and  use  their  forces  in 
the  path  of  a  higher  development.  A  castrated  chastity  is 
a  chastity  without  contents,  neither  virtue  nor  vice  in  any 
character.  The  holiness  of  Heaven  postulates  the  root- 
passions  of  Hell. 

The  next  examples  of  moral  degeneracy  to  claim  notice 
are  those  that  are  met  with  often  at  the  commencement  of 

mental  alienation,  before  the  person  is  so  far  deranged  as  to 

"be  deemed  positively  insane.     Almost  every  kind  of  mental 

/  disorder  begins  with  a  moral  alienation,  not  very  marked 
perhaps  at  the  outset,  but  so  thorough  after  a  time  in  some 
cases  that  a  person  may  seem  the  opposite  of  what  he  was 
in  feeling  and  conduct.  Then  the  hidden  potentialities  of 
his  nature  reveal  themselves  in  a  sad  and  startling  develop- 
ment. In  place  of  diffidence  and  self-restraint  we  see 
exhibited  a  bold  and  presumptuous  address ;  in  place  of 
refined  manners  and  modest  conversation,  coarse  behaviour 
and  indelicate  allusions  ;  in  place  of  chaste  and  decent  con- 

conntries)  were  wont  to  put  great  trust  in  eunuchs ;  because  they  that  are 
envious  towards  all  are  more  obnoxious  and  oflScious  towards  one.     But  yet 
their  tnist  towards  them  hath  rather  been  as  to  good  spials  and  good  whis- 
perers, than  good  magistrates  and  officers.' — Bacon,  Essay  on  Deformity, 
18 


266  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

duct,  indecency  and  even  open  lasciviousness ;  in  place  of 
prudence  in  business,  foolliardiness  in  speculation ;  in  place 
of  candour  and  honourable  dealing,  duplicity,  guile,  and 
even  vicious  and  criminal  tendencies: — these  are  the  trans- 
formations that  are  witnessed  in  difiFerent  cases.  Moreover, 
this  moral  alienation,  which  is  manifest  before  there  is 
positive  intellectual  derangement,  accompanies  the  latter 
throughout  its  course,  and  may  last  for  a  while  after  all  dis- 
order of  intelligence  has  gone ;  it  is  the  truer  and  deeper 
derangement,  being  a  derangement  of  character;  and' 
therefore  it  is  notoriously  not  safe  to  count  the  recovery  of 
a  person  sure  and  stable  until  he  has  returned  to  the  senti- 
ments and  affections  of  his  natural  character. 

Here  then  we  perceive  plainly  that  when  the  mind  under- 
goes degeneration  the  moral  feeling  is  the  first  to  show  it,  as 
it  is  the  last  to  be  restored  when  the  disorder  passes  away : 
the  latest  and  highest  gain  of  mental  evolution,  it  is  the 
first  to  witness  by  its  impairment  to  mental  dissolution  :  the 
first  effect  of  mental  degeneration,  it  is  the  last  to  witness  to 
full  mental  regeneration.  In  undoing  a  mental  organisation 
nature  begins  by  unravelling  the  finest,  most  delicate,  most 
intricately  woven  and  last  completed  threads  of  her  mar- 
vellously complex  network.  Were  the  moral  sense  as  old 
and  firmly  fixed  an  instinct  as  the  instinct  to  walk  upright 
or  the  more  deeply  planted  instinct  of  propagation,  as  many 
people  in  the  presumed  interests  of  morality  have  tried  to 
persuade  themselves  and  others  that  it  is,  it  would  not  be 
the  first  to  suffer  in  this  way  when  mental  degeneration 
begins;  its  categorical  imperative  would  not  take  instant 
flight  at  the  first  assault  but  would  assert  its  authorit}"-  at  a 
later  period  of  the  decline ;  but  being  the  last  acquired  and 
least  fixed,  it  is  most  likely  to  vary,  not  only,  as  I  have 
shown,  in  the  pathological  way  of  degeneracy,  but  also,  as 
might  be  shown  abundantly,  in  physiological  ways,  according 
to  the  diversities  of  conditions  in  which  it  is  placed.  Like 
all  forming  organic  matter,  it  is  plastic  and  exhibits  a  cir- 
cumstance-suiting power ;  and  therefore  it  varies  in  its 
sanctions  in  different  nations,  societies,  sects,  castes,  indi- 
viduals in  a  way  that  a  thoroughly  formed  and  fixed  instinct, 


MORA.L  FEELING  AND  WILL  IN  DISEASE.  267 

like  the  instinct  to  walk  upright,  does  not.  Why  should 
Dot  a  savage  steal  when  he  wants  food,  or  kill  his  mother 
when  she  is  old  and  useless,  or  sell  his  sister's  children, 
since  it  seems  the  most  natural  and  proper  thing  in  the 
world  to  him  ?  'Tis  the  categorical  imperative  of  his 
practical  reason,  the  instinct  of  right  in  him. 

In  this  relation  the  most  interesting  form  of  mental 
disease  perhaps  is  that  which  is  known  in  medicine  as 
general  paralysis ;  interesting  because  it  is  usually  accom- 
panied with  a  signal  paralysis  of  moral  sense  from  the  out- 
set, and  because  we  can  trace  nearly  from  their  first 
beginnings  morbid  changes  in  the  brain  going  along  with 
the  decay  of  mental  and  motor  powers.  Not  exact  and 
complete  relations,  it  is  true,  but  such  broad  general  rela- 
tions as  warrant  the  belief  of  exact  and  complete  relations ; 
while  towards  the  end,  when  the  waning  mental  and  motor 
functions  are  well-nigh  extinct,  there  is  plain  evidence  of 
waste  and  destruction  of  nerve-elements  suiting  well  with 
the  decrepit  functions.  At  the  beginning  of  the  disease 
the  prominent  mental  symptoms  in  the  most  typical  cases 
are  those  of  dejterioration  of  moral  sense  and  will ;  the 
earliest  derangement  of  all  being  a  great  exaltation  of  ideas 
and  feelings  and  will  very  like  that  which  characterises  the 
early  stages  of  alcoholic  intoxication.  Indeed,  it  is  an 
example  that  may  help  us  to  a  conception  of  the  physical 
nature  of  the  initial  process  of  a  moral  derangement.  An 
active  determination  of  blood  accompanies  an  excessive 
action  of  the  nerve-centres,  the  result  of  the  agitation  or 
commotion  in  them  being  an  impairment  of  the  interinhibi- 
tive  functions ;  and  accordingly  the  individual  cannot  apply 
his  mind  closely  and  exactly  to  impressions,  social  or  physi- 
cal, so  as  to  get  a  real  touch  or  hold  of  them  and  of  their  just 
relations  to  one  another— that  is  to  say,  to  apprehend  and 
truly  reflect  them  as  they  are.  Thence  flows  the  appearance 
of  an  egoistic  disdain  or  disregard  of  them ;  all  the  more 
marked  because  the  lower  feelings  of  the  excited  and  exalted 
self,  which  preserve  the  unity  imparted  to  them  by  the 
organic  life,  assert  themselves  with  an  unaccustomed  freedom 
from   reserve.      How   indeed   can   the   individual  perceive 


q  ^^^-A.^A^KJ-T-U-^.^  A.t.,-.-<jp.*H,^t4-e_l^~    \^^<J^ 


A.t-*-%-^iS**,'<4Jt^^~ 


j/ 


268  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

properly  the  object  and  its  relations  if  the  group  of  centres 
that  have  been  organised  to  act  together  in  the  perception 
of  it,  and  the  associate  action  of  which  is  the  perception, 
cannot  combine  as  they  should  owing  to  commotion  in  them  ? 
And  how  can  he,  unperceiving  the  impressions  justly,  feel 
and  act  justly  in  relation  to  them  ?  The  unity  of  his  higher 
nature  is  more  or  less  impaired  by  the  excessive  stimulation — 
its  altruism  suspended  ;  the  unity  of  his  lower  nature  remains 
and  is  made  more  self-assertive  by  it — its  egoism  exag- 
gerated. So  it  is  perhaps  that  you  get  the  moral  impairment 
of  incipient  drunkenness  and  of  the  first  stage  of  typical 
general  paralysis. 

A  not  unfrequent  feature  of  the  moral  deterioration  of 
the  disease,  striking  enough  in  some  cases,  is  a  persistent 
tendency  to  steal,  the  person  stealing  stupidly  for  the  most 
part  what  he  does  not  particularly  want  and  perhaps  makes 
no  use  of  when  he  has  stolen  it.  It  is  not  uncommon 
therefore  for  those  who  are  victims  of  the  disease  in  its  early 
stages  to  be  sent  to  prison  and  treated  there  as  criminals, 
notwithstanding  that  a  duly  skilled  medical  observer  might 
be  able  to  say,  and  perhaps  does  say,  with  entire  certitude, 
from  an  appreciation  of  the  physical  and  mental  symptoms, 
that  the  supposed  criminal  was  attacked  by  an  organic 
disease  of  his  brain  which  had  destroyed  his  moral  sense  at 
the  outset,  which  would  go  on  to  destroy  the  other  faculties  of 
his  mind  in  succession,  and  which  would  end  by  destroying 
life  itself.  Not  wickedness  but  disease  is  what  we  are  really 
confronted  with  in  that  case  ;  and  though  with  the  imperfect 
instruments  of  research  at  our  present  command  we  cannot 
discern  the  actual  minute  structural  changes  which  are  the 
physical  conditions  of  the  deteriorations  of  character,  and 
link  them  in  an  exact  correspondence  the  one  with  the  other, 
we  feel  none  the  less  sure  of  their  existence  and  of  the  un- 
failing correspondence.  In  the  visible  destructive  changes 
that  are  patent  after  death  we  recognise  the  extreme  patho- 
logical issues  of  the  minute  molecular  changes  which,  though 
unseen,  we  are  sure  are  there  at  the  beginning. 

Note  here  and  consider  for  a  moment,  in  passing,  the 
impulse  to  steal  which  is  so  marked  a  feature  in  some, 


MOEAL  FEELING  AND  WILL  IN  DISEASE.  269 

tliougli  not  in  all,  cases  of  general  paralysis.  Whence 
comes  it  ?  It  would  not  be  true  to  say  that  there  is  a 
\  /  hidden  instinct  to  steal  in  all  persons  who  fall  victims  to 
that  disease,  an  instinct  that  is  unveiled  by  its  ravages, 
since  all  general  paralytics  do  not  exhibit  it.  But  it  is  true 
that  there  is  in  every  one  a  strong  self-conservative  instinct, 
which  in  the  domain  of  complex  social  evolution  shows 
itself  in  manifold  secondary  modes  of  self-preservation  and 
self-aggrandisement.  The  information  we  need,  and  which 
must  be  set  down  as  entirely  wanting,  is  a  full  and  exact 
previous  history  of  the  character  of  the  individual  who  ex- 
hibits this  symptom,  in  respect  particularly  of  the  strength 
and  forms  of  his  acquisitive  tendencies,  and  the  full  and 
exact  character-histories  also  of  the  members  of  his  family, 
since  in  one  or  another  of  them  we  may  perceive  in  full  dis- 
play what  lay  in  germ  only  in  him.  It  is  a  close  and  rigid 
study  of  individual  psychology  that  is  wanting  and  is  wanted ; 
for  to  learn,  as  we  do  perhaps  in  some  cases,  that  insanity  or 
another  form  of  nervous  disease  existed  in  his  ancestors, 
though  a  distinct  advance  on  anything  that  pure  psychology 
can  tell  us,  is  still  knowledge  so  vague  and  general  as  to  be 
of  little  more  value  than  it  would  be  to  know  that  he  was 
born  when  this  or  that  planet  was  in  the  ascendant.  Had 
we  such  exact  histories  at  our  service,  and  could  we  there- 
upon find  our  way  through  the  complicated  interactions,  by 
tracing  the  orderly  developments  which  undoubtedly  exist 
in  the  seeming  disorder,  it  is  certain  that  we  should  discover 
the  required  explanation.  The  impulse  to  steal  would 
perhaps  be  revealed  as  the  pathological  evolution  of  strong 
or  strongly  self-regarding  acquisitive  impulses  in  that  family 
nature. 

More  than  a  mere  knowledge  of  the  family  bent  of 
nature,  however,  would  be  needed  in  any  case :  in  order  to 
understand  fully  the  varieties  of  moral  derangement,  it 
would  be  necessary  to  study  them  in  relation  to  (a)  the 
exact  character  of  the  individual  as  it  has  been  formed 
by  inheritance  and  training ;  (6)  the  particular  disinte- 
gration of  it  by  disease,  according  to  the  degree,  extent 
and  particular  character  of  the  disease — that  is  to  say,  its 


270  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

special  morbid  range  and  the  special  damage  it  lias  done ; 
and  (c)  the  subsequent  pathological  developments  of  the  dis- 
integrate character  ;  which  may  be  of  little  moment  in  some 
cases,  as  in  general  paralysis,  where  the  severity  of  the 
organic  disease,  entailing  a  mental  destruction,  precludes 
them,  but  of  great  importance  in  other  cases,  as  for  example 
in  chronic  hereditary  insanity,  where  there  is  no  such 
hindrance  to  the  developments  of  morbid  or  degenerate 
varieties  of  human  nature.  Let  no  one  then  at  any  time 
deceive  himself  by  laying  the  evil  impulses  within  him  to  the 
charge  of  a  devil  or  any  other  external  principle  of  evil,  but 
let  him  rather  search  diligently  for  the  source  of  them  in 
himself  and  in  his  ancestral  antecedents,  and  endeavour 
patiently  to  eradicate  them  in  himself  and  in  his  posterity. 

Here  let  us  pause  for  a  moment  in  order  to  mark  the 
ground  which  has  thus  far  been  gained  and  to  see  where 
we  now  stand.  It  was  shown  first,  being  set  down  as  a 
fact  of  observation,  that  mental  derangement  in  one  gene- 
ration is  sometimes  the  cause  of  an  innate  deficience  or 
absence  of  moral  sense  in  the  succeeding  generation,  the 
child  bearing  the  burden  of  ancestral  depravation  in  a  con- 
genital deprivation ;  and  we  now  place  by  the  side  of  that 
statement  this  second  observation — that  moral  feeling,  the 
finest  flower  of  social  evolution,  is  the  first  function  of  mind 
to  be  affected  at  the  beginning  of  mental  derangement  in  the 
individual.  Thus  it  appears  that  an  absence  or  impairment 
of  moral  sense  marks  the  way  of  degeneracy  in  the  individual 
and  through  generations  :  as  man  begins  to  go  to  pieces, 
alike  as  individual,  as  family,  as  society,  as  nation,  as 
humanity,  the  moral  feeling  goes  :  the  last  to  inspire  him  it 
\is  the  first  to  expire  in  him. 

The  next  examples  of  marred  moral  character  and  will 
to  which  I  call  attention  are  those  which  sometimes  follow 
injuries  of  the  head.  It  happens  in  these  cases  after  an  in- 
jury that  may  or  may  not  have  caused  immediate  symptoms 
of  a  serious  nature,  that  slow  degenerative  changes  are  set 
up  in  the  brain,  which  go  on  in  an  insidious  way  for  months 
or  years  and  produce  first  great  irritability,  then  little  by 

K       little  a  weakening,  and  eventually  a  destruction  of  mind. 


q  t\^K..    V— "U^M'^'^f-'V^  ^1     i*    /  /'4-'^i'''>T»%-'t— ^       &i*V*^C<i*»<»V»^  -^ 


!/• 


<'- 


MORAL  FEELING  AND  WILL  IN  DISEASE.  271 

The  person  wlio  appears  perhaps  to  be  all  right  soon  after 
his  accident  turns  out  to  be  all  wrong,  and  irretrievably 
wrong,  years  after  it.  Now  the  instructive  matter  is  that 
the  moral  character  is  usually  impaired  first  in  these  cases, 
and  in  some  of  them  is  completely  perverted  without  a  corre- 
sponding deterioration  of  the  understanding.  The  injury  has 
given  rise  to  disorder  in  the  most  delicate  part  of  the  mental 
organisation,  the  part  which  is  only  separated  from  actual 
contact  with  the  internal  surface  of  the  skull  by  the  thin 
investing  membranes  of  the  brain ;  and  once  this  delicate 
organisation  has  been  seriously  damaged,  it  is  seldom  that  it 
is  ever  restored  completely  to  its  former  state  of  soundness. 
The  first  symptom  to  attract  notice  is  a  change  of  temper 
and  disposition  for  the  worse,  the  most  fine  sensibilities  and 
the  highest  inhibitive  functions  having  been  plainly  impaired. 
He  is  easily  and  unduly  excitable,  especially  by  alcohol,  a 
little  of  which  will  produce  a  great  effect,  perhaps  rendering 
him  actually  insane  for  the  time  its  effects  last ;  he  is  prone 

to  outbreaks  of  anger  which  mount  almost  to  outbreaks  of 
maniacal  fury ;  may  indulge  in  excesses  that  are  quite 
foreign  to  his  natural  character ;  a  moderate  fever  or  other 

Tnfl^ammatory  disorder  will  give  rise  to  delirium ;  he  is  easily 
exhausted  by  mental  exertion  to  which  he  finds  himself  un- 

"equal;  is  incapable  of  systematic  and  steady  application. 
The  meaning  of  these  symptoms  is  that  the  co-ordina,tion  of 
the  supreme  mind-centres  has  been  so  weakened  by  their  dis- 
order, their  equilibrium  rendered  so  unstable,  that  it  is  easily 
overthrown  by  causes  that  would  have  no  such  effect  upon  a 
sound  mental  organisation.  As  matters  get  worse,  an  in- 
creasing loss  of  memory  and  other  symptoms  of  mental 
decay  show  themselves,  and  the  course  of  events  is  pretty 
regularly,  or  with  intercurrence  of  acute  mania  and  perhaps 
epileptic  fits,  to  dementia — the  term  of  the  morbid  degene- 
ration. 

Here  it  will  be  proper  to  take  particular  note  of  the  sig- 
nificant fact  that  one  whose  mental  organisation  has  been 
lamed  by  injury  to  the  head  in  the  way  just  described  is,  at 
the  commencement  of  the  trouble,  very  much  like  in  general 
temper  and  quality  of  mind  one  who  has  inherited  a  distinct 


272  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

tendency  to  insanity :  his  weakened  brain  is  brought  to  an 
unstable  state  very  much  like  that  which  the  latter  has  in- 
herited naturally.  Easy  excitability,  especially  by  alcohol, 
outbursts  of  passion  that  overflow  into  torrents  of  incoherent 
fury,  sudden  and  passing,  delirium  lighted  by  a  moderate 
Fever  or  by  other  causes  which  would  be  inadequate  ordi- 
narily to  produce  that  effect — these  and  the  like  are  signs  of 
weak  inhibitive  powers  of  the  higher  social  or  moral  sort ; 
the  natural  result  of.such  weakness  being  the  indulgence  of 
egoistic  tendencies,  anti-social  in  their  operation,  and  an 
ever-increasing  mischief  as  habit  makes  the  way  of  disorder 
easier  and  the  return  to  order  harder.  Later  on  more  shall 
be  said  concerning  the  qualities  of  a  brain  whose  temper  has 
the  flaw  of  a  predisposition  to  degenerate  mental  function ; 
at  present  I  desire  only  to  note  the  resemblance  between  it 
and  the  brain  that  has  been  damaged  by  the  effects  of 
violence.  Assuredly  passion  and  prudence,  self-control  and 
reflection,  right  and  wrong,  even  pleasure  and  pain  have 
very  different  meanings  to  a  person  so  constituted  or  so 
maimed  morally  from  what  they  have  to  one  who  has  no 
reason  whatever  to  blame  either  inheritance  or  accident. 

To  discuss  at  length  the  abstract  question  whether  pleasure 
is  the  aim  of  human  conduct  seems  to  be  hardly  a  more  fruit- 
ful procedure  than  it  would  be  to  discuss  whether  stockings 
are  the  aim  of  human  feet.  I  suppose  if  mankind  had  not 
practically  felt  it  a  proper  aim  to  pursue  pleasure  and  to  shun 
pain  they  would  not  have  invented  Heaven  as  a  place  to  be 
aspired  to,  and  Hell  as  a  place  to  be  recoiled  from  ;  a  reflec- 
tion which  may  be  allowed  to  settle  the  abstract  question  for 
us  here.  Certainly  a  prior  obligation  that  would  properly 
lie  upon  us  before  we  made  the  attempt  to  ascend  into  the 
high  regions  of  abstract  discussion  would  be  to  find  a  solid 
standing  ground  in  a  concrete  study  of  the  particular  indi- 
vidual and  his  particular  likings  and  dislikings,  pleasures 
and  pains,  as  determined  by  natural  temper,  training,  age, 
constitutional  state  and  the  like ;  for  certain  it  is  that  one 
man's  pleasures  are  another  man's  pains,  and  that  the  same 
person  may  find  very  bitter  at  fifty  years  of  age  what  he 
relished  acutely  at  twenty-five.      Moreover,  if  pleasure,  is  it 


_**"  MORAL  PEELING  AND  WILL  IN  DISEASE.  '273 


immediate  or  distant,  seeingthat  it  depends  on  the  individual's 
foresight  whether  he  looks  beyond  the  moment,  or  the  hour, 
or  the  day,  or  the  year?  And,  if  distant,  is  it  minutes,  years, 
or  centuries  distant,  since  the  direct  pleasure  of  the  moment 
may  be  a  sacrifice  of  self  to  an  unborn  posterity  ?  To  settle 
abstractly  whether  pleasure  is  or  is  not  the  end  of  human 
conduct  is  very  much  like  settling  the  question  after  it  has 
been  emptied  of  its  contents. 

Thus  far  it  has  been  shown  that  moral  feeling  and  will 

^  are  impaired  or  destroyed  by  degeneration  going  on  through 
^generations,  by  the  disorganising  effects  of  disease,  and  by 
direct  physical  injury  to  the  brain.  I  now  go  on  to  point 
out  that  the  same  effects  are  produced  by  the  chemical 
action  of  certain  substances  which,  when  taken  in  excess,  are 
poisons  to  the  nervous  system — by  the  abuse  of  such  nerve- 
stimulating  and  nerve-narcotising  substances  as  alcohol  and 
opium.     Nowhere  is  to  be  found  a  more  miserable  specimen 

f     of  degradation  of  moral  feeling  and  of  impotence  of  will  than 

"^     is  presented  by  the  person  who  has  become  the  abject  slave 
of  either  of  these  pernicious  indulgences.     His  finest  moral 

»  sensibilities  are  extinguished  and  his  least  fine  blunted :_ 
"steadily  sensitive  to  his  own  selfish  wants  and  persistent  to 
gratify  them,  he  is  insensible  to  the  feelings  and  claims  of 
his  family  whose  dearest  interests  he  sacrifices  without  real 
compunction,  and  indifferent  to  the  obligations  and  responsi- 
bilities of  his  social  position ;  he  will  often  pi'ofess  you  very 
fine  sentiments,  and  perhaps  indulge  in  the  pleasant  debau- 
chery of  a  visionary  imagination  inspired  by  intensely  egoistic 
feeling  and  stimulated  by  the  drug,  but  uncontrolled  by  reali- 
ties, the  disciplinary  and  disagreeable  hold  of  which  the  drug 
has  deadened  or  destroyed ;  for  the  most  part  he  is  untruth- 
ful and  untrustworthy,  and  in  the  worst  end  there  is  not  a 
meanness  of  pretence  or  of  conduct  he  will  not  descend  to, 
not  a  lie  he  will  not  tell,  not  a  degradation  he  will  not  undergo, 
scarce  a  fraud  he  will  not  perpetrate,  in  order  to  gratify 
his  absorbing  craving.  It  is  not  enough  to  say  that  passion 
is  strengthened  and  will  weakened  by  indulgence,  as  a  moral 
effect :  that  is  so  no  doubt,  but  beneath  that  effect  there  lies 
the  deeper  fact  of  a  physical  deterioration  of  nerve-element ; 


274  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

for  the  alcoliol  and  tlie  opium  enter  the  blood,  are  carried 
by  it  to  the  inmost  minute  recesses  of  the  brain,  and  act 
there  injuriously  upon  the  elements  of  the  exquisitely  deli- 
cate structures.  So  its  finest,  latest  organised,  least  stable 
parts  which  subserve  moral  feeling  and  supreme  will  are 
marred.  Vain  is  it  to  preach  reformation  to  one  who  has 
brought  himself  into  this  damnable  predicament;  if  any 
good  is  to  be  done  with  him  he  must  be  restrained  forcibly 
from  his  besetting  vice  for  a  long  enough  time  to  allow  the 
brain  to  get  rid  of  the  poison,  which  it  will  do  pretty  soon, 
and  its  tissues  to  recover  their  healthy  tone,  which  they  will 
take  a  long  time  to  do,  if  they  ever  do.  Moreover,  the  tis- 
sues have  sometimes  had  the  congenital  misfortune  to  begin 
vdth  the  original  taint  of  a  depraved  tone;  they  have  in- 
herited the  proclivity  to  drink,  it  is  ingrained  in  their  nature; 
and  once  the  craving  is  stirred  it  is  kindled  quickly  by  gra- 
tification into  uncontrollable  desire. 

There  is  nothing  pleasant  in  the  taste  of  alcohol  or  of 
opium — at  any  rate  in  the  first  instance  before  experience 
of  their  pleasing  mental  effects  has  associated  that  pleasure 
with  the  experience  of  the  means  to  it,  and  so,  by  a  fusion  of 
the  pleasure  of  the  end  with  the  means,  produced  a  vitiation 
of  the  natural  taste — to  make  men  betake  themselves  to 
them  so  eagerly  as  they  do  all  over  the  world.  This  eager 
use  running  headlong  into  abuse  is  evidence  of  the  longing 
that  there  is  in  human  nature  for  the  ideal ;  for  an  elation 
of  feeling,  an  expansion  of  sympathy,  a  freedom  of  mental 
power,  an  exaltation  of  the  whole  nature,  mental  and  bodily, 
are  obtained  thereby  which  are  denied  to  it  by  the  real.  The 
low  savage  does  not  care  for  the  taste  of  rum,  but  once  he 
has  had  the  ideal  opened  to  him  by  feeling  the  exhilarating 
effects  of  it  he  will  sacrifice  everything  he  possesses,  even 
Tiis  last  blanket,  to  procure  it,  and  abandon  himself  unre- 
strainedly to  its  effects  whenever  he  has  the  opportunity ;  so 
that  there  is  no  surer  way  of  initiating  and  hastening  the 
decline  and  extinction  of  savage  races  than  by  the  introduc- 
tion of  alcohol  among  them.*     Herein  we  see  a  curious  proof 

•  Except  perhaps  to  bring  them  into  contact  with  civilisation,  and  to 
expect  them  to  conform  to  its  usages  1    To  impose  regularity  and  constraint  on 


MORAL  FEELING  AND  WILL  IN  DISEASE.  275 

of  the  wide  gap  that  there  is  between  the  lowest  human 
being  and  the  highest  animal,  for  no  animal,  except  perhaps 
here  and  there  a  monkey  or  an  elephant,  appears  to  have 
such  a  taste  of  the  ideal  kindled  in  it  by  alcohol  as  to  over- 
come the  repugnance  of  its  natural  taste.  When  it  is  made 
a  reproach  to  the  drunkard  that  he  degrades  himself  in  a 
way  which  no  brute  ever  does,  he  may  claim  that  as  proof  of 
his  higher  capacity  and  higher  aspiration,  confessing  how- 
ever, if  he  be  penitent  enough,  to  a  cultivation  of  the  ideal  in 
a  wrong  fashion.  Were  he  mere  brute  he  would  be  content, 
like  it,  to  live  in  the  gratifications  of  his  senses :  it  is  because 
he  has  higher  yearnings  in  him  that  he  is  dissatisfied  with 
the  real  of  sense,  craves  a  compensating  ideal  of  the  imagina- 
tion, and  creates  it  for  himself  either  as  drunken  bliss,  or  as 
a  vision  of  earthly  grandear  in  some  shape  or  other,  or  as  a 
life  of  eternal  happiness  in  the  world  to  come — a  house  not 
made  with  hands,  eternal  in  the  heavens.  Pessimism  in  fact 
supplemented  by  optimism  in  theory — such  the  eternal  plan 
of  human  life ;  wherefore  the  two  rules  of  it  come  finally  to 
be,  according  to  the  dark  or  bright  ground-tone  of  the  indi- 
vidual's nature,  according  as  it  is  instinct  with  the  hard  logic 
of  reason  or  animated  with  the  warm  hope  of  imagination  — 
Ilfaut  cuUiver  notre  jardin,  and  Ilfaut  cultiver  notre  ideal. 

natures  that  demand  lawless  liberty;  to  create  in  them  wants  which  they 
have  not  and  which  they  think  you  strangely  contemptible  for  having ;  to 
attempt  to  instil  abstract  thoughts  and  moral  feeling  into  beings  whose  lan- 
guage is  a  vehicle  incapable  of  conveying  them,  who  have  only  sensations  and 
few,  simple,  and  mean  ideas,  and  who  practise  a  gross  sensualism  ; — what  is  it 
but  to  break  up  the  foundations  of  their  mental  being  ?  To  beings  of  so  low 
and  simple  a  mental  organisation  Christianity  is  a  disintegrant — as  pernicious 
almost  as  alcohol. 


276  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

SECTION  IV. 

THE   MOEAL    SENSE   AND   WILL   IN   CRIMINALS. 

Habitual  criminals  are  a  class  of  beings  wliose  lives  are 
sufficient  proof  of  tlie  absence  or  great  bluntness  of  moral 
sense.  It  is  the  common  experience  and  common  testimony 
of  those  who  have  much  to  do  with  these  antisocial  varieties 
of  the  human  kind  that  a  certain  proportion  of  them  are  of 
distinctly  weak  intellect,  albeit  not  sufficiently  so  to  warrant 
their  seclusion  in  asylums  as  idiots  or  imbeciles.  They 
abound  among  vagrants,  partly  from  a  restless  disposition 
and  an  inability  to  apply  themselves  to  steady  and 
systematic  work,  and  partly  because  they  do  not  easily  find 
or  keep  employment.  They  are  addicted  to  petty  thefts,  to 
acts  of  wanton  mischief,  and,  much  more  so  than  the 
criminals  that  are  not  of  such  plainly  low  organisation,  to 
arson,  to  sexual  offences,  and  even  to  homicide.  The  ex- 
ternal conditions  of  civilised  life  are  too  fine  and  complex 
for  their  blunt  and  defective  capacities,  and  they  are  unable 
to  adjust  themselves  to  them  so  as  to  procure  the  gratifica- 
tion of  their  propensities  or  even  the  means  of  living ;  hence 
it  is  that,  urged  by  their  instincts  and  impatient  of  restraints 
whose  nature  they  are  incapable  of  appreciating,  they  are 
prone  to  explode  in  some  criminal  act.  Sometimes  they  are 
provoked  to  a  passionate  act  of  violence  by  those  who  tease 
or  otherwise  irritate  them  ;  sometimes  they  are  impelled  to 
imitate  a  crime  of  which  they  have  read  or  heard  spoken ; 
sometimes  they  are  used  designedly  as  instruments  by 
criminals  of  stronger  intellect  whom  they  look  up  to  with  a 
sort  of  respect.  Their  fate  is  indeed  a  hard  one.  Congenital 
outcasts  from  the  social  organisation  by  the  preordination 
of  the  society  that  has  produced  them,  it  is  nevertheless 
demanded  of  them  that  they  should  conform  to  the  laws 
of  a  body  of  which  they  are  not  a  part,  but  from  which  thoy 
are  apart;  and  they  natuially  fall  back  upon  the  inalienable 
i-ight  of  the  individual  to  be :  that  right  of  which  no  one 
can  be  deprived  or  deprive  himself,  quo  nemo  cedere  potest,  as 


MORAL  SENSE  AND  WILL  IN  CRIMINALS .  277 

Spinoza  says — the  right,  that  is  to  say,  to  live  and  to  pursue 
the  means  to  live. 

In  prison  they  prove  troublesome  to  the  officials,  partly 
because  of  their  irritable  rnoods  and  small  self-control,  and 
partly  because  other  prisoners,  taking  advantage  of  their 
weakness,  instigate  them  to  acts  of  insubordination.  They 
will  generally  listen  respectfully  to  the  admonitions  of  the 
chaplain  and  express  readily  and  superabundantly  the 
penitence  which  he  solicits ;  one  of  them,  for  example,  of  whom 
Dr.  Guy  makes  mention,  confessed  to  as  many  as  five 
murders  which  he  had  never  committed ;  but  they  have  no 
real  sense  of  the  wickedness  of  their  doings,  feel  no  true 
remorse,  are  incapable  of  genuine  penitence.  Their  de- 
fective natures  will  not  take  the  stamp  of  virtue.  Their 
lives  therefore  are  spent  in  alternations  of  long  periods  in 
and  of  short  periods  out  of  prison;  for  after  undergoing 
their  punishment  for  some  offence  or  other  they  are  dis- 
charged at  the  expiration  of  their  sentences,  and,  soon 
committing  crime  again,  are  soon  convicted  again.  Prison 
officials  who  perceive  them  to  be  mentally  weak  and  irre- 
claimable, and  know  how  surely  they  will  resort  to  their 
criminal  ways  when  they  are  free,  would  gladly  see  a  way  to 
some  means  of  detaining  them  in  a  special  estabhshment  at 
the  end  of  their  terms  of  punishment  or  immediately  after 
conviction,  but  as  they  cannot  certify  them  to  be  actually 
insane  or  imbecile  in  the  legal  sense  no  such  protec- 
tion is  given.  Some  of  them  are  epileptic,  and  others  of 
them  have  sprung  from  families  in  which  epilepsy,  insanity, 
or  some  allied  neurosis  exists.  Malformed  or  deformed  in 
part  or  whole  of  body,  with  irregular  and  bad  conformation 
of  head  and  face— that  has  been  the  representation  of 
criminals  by  sculptors  and  painters  at  all  times ;  and  it  may 
justly  be  taken  to  be  the  intuition  of  experience,  the  con- 
solidated result  of  observation  that  the  organisation  of  the 
wicked  is  commonly  defective.  Pity  it  is  that  no  better  use 
is  made  of  beings  so  mal-organised  as  to  be  utterly  incapable 
of  moral  sensibility  and  therefore  of  repentance  and  reform, 
than  to  punish  them  with  sufferings  which  do  them  no  good, 
and  after  that  to  turn  them  loose  again  upon  society  in 


278  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

which  they  can  make  no  living  room  for  themselves  except 
by  crime.  It  is  as  if  the  bodily  organism,  having  bred  a 
morbid  element  which  by  its  nature  could  not  take  part  in 
the  healthy  physiological  life,  but  must  cause  disorder  of  it 
by  its  presence,  were  not  solicitous  to  get  rid  of  it  altogether 
by  excretion  or  to  render  it  harmless  by  isolation  in  a 
morbid  capsule  or  in  a  special  morbid  area,  but  were  to 
launch  it  again  and  again  after  each  brief  period  of  isolation 
among  the  elements  of  the  healthy  structures  in  order  to 
generate  new  disorder.  To  educate  them  is  not  to  improve 
them,  it  is  simply  to  render  them  more  dangerous. 

Weak  as  these  habitual  criminals  sometimes  are  in 
understanding,  it  is  instructive  to  observe  how  they  consort 
together  by  an  elective  affinity  and  are  united  into  a  loosely 
gregarious  society  by  bonds  of  a  kind — for  example,  by  the 
respect  which  the  weaker  has  for  the  stronger  criminal,  by 
their  mutual  .aid  and  defence  against  the  common  enemy  on 
which  they  prey,  by  the  secrecy  which  they  have  to  preserve, 
by  the  thieves'  honour  which  they  show  in  the  division  of 
spoils,  and  by  the  like  tacit  leagues :  a  society  that  they 
would  not  keep  up,  since  they  would  never  conform  willinglj'- 
to  any  code,  but  for  the  constant  pressure  and  always  mena- 
cing danger  from  without.  In  these  rude  rudiments  of  morals 
they  yield  us  an  incidentally  instructive  example  of  a  moral 
sense  in  the  making,  for  they  consider  it  entirely  wrong  to 
do  to  one  another  what  they  do  not  think  it  in  the  least 
wrong  to  do  to  society  as  a  whole ;  not  otherwise  than  as, 
according  to  the  moral  code  of  the  Old  Testament,  *  Thou 
shalt  not  kill '  and  '  Thou  shalt  not  steal,'  having  a  specially 
tribal  application,  did  not  mean,  *  Thou  shalt  not  kill  a 
Canaanite  '  and  '  Thou  shalt  not  spoil  an  Egyptian.' 

A  class  of  people  who,  congenitally  destitute  of  moral 
sense,  have  not  the  sensibilities  to  feel  and  respond  to  im- 
pressions of  a  moral  kind,  any  more  than  one  who  is  colour-, 
bhnd  has  sensibility  to  certain  colours — ought  to  be  deeply 
interesting  to  the  metaphysical  psychologist,  who,  however, 
has  strangely  ignored  them  in  the  construction  of  his  philo- 
sophical theories.  They  are  apt  instances  to  prove  to  him 
that  if,  as  he  alleges,  the  moral  sense  has  not  been  acquired 


MORAL  SENSE  AND  WILL  IN   CRIMINALS.  279 

in  the  process  of  natural  evolution,  but  infused  by  a  super- 
natural inspiration,  it  may  at  any  rate  be  degraded  and  lost 
by  tbe  operations  of  natural  law  in  a  process  of  human  de- 
generation. Degenerate  varieties  of  the  kind  who  would 
have  to  be  regenerate  in  order  to  be  fit  for  any  true  social 
use,  they  mai'k  the  categorical  imperative  of  the  moral  sense 
brought  down  to  zero.  What  more  important  and  helpful  to 
him  in  the  construction  of  a  moral  scale  from  positive  data 
than  to  have  the  zero  thus  definitely  fixed  ?  Unfortunately 
they  have  not  yet  been  made  the  subject  of  exact  and  positive 
inquiry,  although  I  cannot  doubt  that  a  thorough  and  com- 
plete scientific  study  of  one  such  person,  and  of  the  ante- 
cedent conditions  of  his  being,  making  manifest  how  he 
had  come,  what  exactly  he  was,  and  what  was  the  social 
meaning  of  him,  would  be  more  instructive  than  all  the 
scholastic  disquisitions  concerning  the  moral  sense  that  have 
been  put  forth  by  ambitious  thinkers.  It  is  in  truth  sad 
to  reflect  that  no  scientific  use  is  made  of  the  abundant 
material  for  practical  studies  in  psychology  which  our  prisons 
contain,  and  that  when  the  world  is  startled  by  some 
atrocious  crime,  and  shocked  by  the  subsequent  exhibition 
of  an  entire  moral  insensibility  in  its  perpetrator,  it  thinks 
it  has  done  enough  when  it  has  uttered  a  loud  howl  of  re- 
probation and  insisted  on  his  being  put  out  of  the  world  or 
out  of  the  way.  The  makers  and  administrators  of  law  ought 
reall}'-  to  have  some  pity  for  these  defective  beings  suffering, 
as  they  do,  under  an  irremediably  bad  organisation  ;  but  so 
far  are  they  from  showing  compassion  for  them  that  they 
punish  them  angrily,  not  with  the  hope  of  reforming  them, 
seeing  that  experience  has  proved  that  to  be  impossible,  nor 
with  the  hope  of  warning  and  improving  others  like  them, 
seeing  that  their  special  examples  can  be  no  benefit  to  those 
who,  defectively  organised  like  them,  are  equally  beyond 
remedy,  but  in  retaliation  for  what  they  have  made  society 
suffer  by  their  wrong-doings.  Therein,  though  they  cannot 
plead  the  warrant  of  philosophy,  they  rightly  plead  an  imita- 
tion of  the  Divine  exemplar  who,  claiming  vengeance  as  his 
own,  has  given  it  full  play  in  the  infliction  of  eternal  punish- 
ment :  the  institution  of  infinite  torture,  paradox  as  it  seems. 


280  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

being  tlie  necessary  and  logical  result  of  God's  infinite  love 
for  Himself.^ 

So  much  for  tlie  victims  of  a  bad  organisation  who  are 
urged  into  crime  by  instincts  whose  natural  restraints  are 
wanting,  whatever  their  circumstances  of  life,  and  are  not  to 
be  reformed  by  instruction,  or  by  example,  or  by  correction. 
Another  class  of  criminals,  standing  at  the  opposite  end  of 
the  scale  to  them,  comprise  those  who,  not  being  positively 
criminally  disposed  by  nature,  have  yet  fallen  into  crime  in 
consequence  of  a  gradually  increased  or  a  suddenly  inflicted 
pressure  of  adverse  circumstances.  They  were  probably 
much  like  hundreds  of  persons  who  have  never  overstepped 
the  conventional  line  between  their  trade-morality  and 
acknowledged  crime,  but  they  were  so  unfortunate  in  the 
changes  and  chances  of  life  as  to  be  exposed  to  suddenly 
urgent  or  to  insidiously  sapping  temptation ;  and  they 
succumbed.  Plainly  they  had  not  the  best  moral  fibre,  or 
they  would  have  stood  firm  in  resisting  whatever  temptation 
they  were  exposed  to,  but  they  were  not  worse  endowed  in 
that  respect  than  many  who,  by  reason  of  more  fortunate 
circumstances,  have  escaped  a  similar  adverse  stress  and 
fate.  A  great  deal  of  the  virtue  of  life  is  owing  to  the 
absence  of  the  fit  provocation  to  vice ;  if  among  a  hundred 
women  one  commits  adultery,  may  we  not  safely  say  that 
there  are  some  of  the  ninety-nine  others  who  would  have 
done  the  same  in  the  same  circumstances  ? 

Between  the  two  classes  of  criminals  mentioned,  the 
nature-made  and  the  circumstance-made  criminal,  will  come 
a  third  class  comprising  those  who,  having  some  degree  of 
criminal  disposition,  would  have  been  saved  from  crime  had 
they  enjoyed  the  advantages  of  a  good  training  and  of 
favourable  surroundings,  instead  of  growing  up  without 
education  and  amidst  criminal  surroundings.  The  circum- 
stance-suiting faculty  of  the  brain  adapts  itself  readily  to 
the  criminal  atmosphere  and  grows  to  that  inode  of  exercise. 
And  in  this  relation  it  certainly  ought  not  to  be  forgotten 
that  there  is  education  and  education,  and  that  it  is  small 
profit  to  teach  a  child  the  distance  of  the  sun  from  the  earth, 
'  See  an  article  in  the  Month  of  January  1882,  by  the  Rev.  Father  Clark. 


O^-^-s-^     >V>a'T-W-7A-<^^-v^  ^' -f/. 


'•  r  (/^ 


MORAL  SENSE  AND  WILL  IN  CRIMINALS.  281 

if  it  be  not  taught  at  the  same  time  to  know,  and  not  taught 
to  know  only  but  trained  to  feel,  the  distance  between  its 
higher  and  lower  natures. 

This  division  of  criminals  into  three  classes  serves  well 
for  convenience  of  apprehension,  but  of  course  they  are 
not  thus  separated  by  actual  divisions  in  nature ;  on  the 
contrary,  they  are  united  by  all  varieties  of  intermediate 
cases ;  degrees  of  difference  of  moral  strength  in  different 
individuals  being  as  constant  and  as  common  as  different 
degrees  of  intelligence.  To  apportion  responsibility  exactly 
according  to  deserts  would  be  a  task  exceeding  the  re- 
sources of  human  justice ;  but  to  attribute  the  same 
measure  of  moral  capacity  to  all  persons  is  to  accuse  divine 
justice,  which  has  ordained  things  far  otherwise.  Meanwhile 
it  is  not  a  little  curious  to  reflect  that  while  all  the  world 
entertains  more  or  less  pity  for  the  criminals  of  our  second 
and  third  classes,  making  allowance  for  them  as  victims  of 
unfortunate  circumstances,  it  has  no  sort  of  pity  for  those  of 
_the  first  class,  who  are  really  the  victims  of  a  worse  fate — 
^-the  fate  made  for  them  by  the  tyranny  of  a  bad  organisa- 
tion. I  suppose  the  reason  of  that  is  that  they  stir  an  in- 
stinct of  repulsion,  because,  regarded  from  the  standpoint 
of  the  human  ideal,  they  are  felt  to  be  less  human.  But 
why,  viewing  the  matter  from  a  more  detached  standpoint, 
should  a  lame  mind  provoke  any  more  anger  than  a  lame 
body  ? 

The  foregoing  reflections  suffice  to  show  that  when  man's 
nature  is  made  the  subject  of  serious  study  the  instigation 
of  the  Devil  is  not  an  admissible  explanation  of  its  evil  im- 
pulses ;  that  in  all  cases  we  must  seek  elsewhere  for  a  natural 
cause  of  the  effect  defective.  Nor  is  it  again  enough  to  think  of 
such  impulses  as  self -procreated  in  a  spiritual  entity,  spring- 
ing up  mysteriously  in  ib  from  nowhere,  and  not  legitimate 
subjects  of  scientific  inquiry.  Man  will  never  truly  realise 
the  progress  in  self-improvement  which  he  is  capable  of 
making,  until  he  searches  out  exactly  the  laws  by  which  he 
has  become  what  he  is  and  uses  his  knowledge  systematically 
to  make  himself  different.     The  problem  is  the  same  here  as 

it  is  in  the  lower  sciences — prevision  for  the  purposes  of 
19 


282  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

action  :  to  observe  in  order  to  foresee,  and  to  foresee  in  order 
to  modify  and  direct.  And  the  method  to  be  employed  is 
the  same  as  that  which  has  served  so  well  in  them — that  is, 
the  patient  and  dili<jent  application  of  the  method  of  obser- 
vation and  induction.  At  one  time  it  was  the  general 
belief  that  earthquakes,  destructive  storms,  and  other  great 
physical  calamities  were  the  work  of  Satan  ;  the  belief  that 
lunatics  were  possessed  with  devils,  who  instigated  their 
violent  deeds,  continued  in  vogue  until  quite  a  late  period ; 
and  it  is  still  a  belief  in  many  quarters  that  the  evil  impulses 
of  the  wicked  are  inspired  in  them  by  the  Devil,  who  by  the 
loss  of  successive  provinces  in  nature  has  now  been  driven 
to  his  last  entrenchment  in  the  human  heart.  And  it  seems 
likely  that  he  will  soon  be  driven  out  of  that ;  for  as  we 
search  out  diligently  the  causes  of  those  great  physical 
calamities  of  nature  which  were  once  thought  to  be  of  super- 
natural origin,  and  endeavour  to  prevent  or  to  lessen  by 
suitable  means  and  appliances  the  damage  which  they  do ; 
and  as  in  like  manner  we  inquire  patiently  into  the  nature 
of  the  diseases  that  afflict  the  insane  and  try  to  cure  them ; 
so  we  have  now  to  search  and  learn  whether  the  evil  spirit 
that  is  in  the  wicked  man,  who  in  the  land  of  uprightness 
deals  unjustly  and  will  not  turn  away  fi'om  his  wickedness 
to  learn  righteousness  and  to  do  justly,  is  not  the  legacy  of 
parental  or  other  ancestral  error,  wrong-doing,  misfortune,  or 
vice.  When  that  inquiry  has  been  completed  successfully, 
it  is  not  improbable  that  the  domain  of  the  supernatural  in 
human  aflpjirs  will  be  yet  further  contracted ;  but  if  it  be 
actually  extinguished  mankind  must  bear  the  last  great 
loss  patiently,  as  they  have  borne  the  extinction  of  Mars  and 
Minerva,  of  the  miracle-worker  and  the  astrologer,  of  the 
beliefs  in  witchcraft  and  in  special  supernatural  interpositions 
to  reverse  natural  laws.  Meanwhile  it  is  worth  noting  here 
that  the  theory  of  Satanic  impulse  was  based  upon  a  genuine 
recognition  of  facts  in  so  far  as  it  admitted  a  determination 
of  the  individual  by  a  stronger  power  in  himself  than  hie 
could  counteract,  while  it  strove  hard,  ingeniously  compro- 
mising matters,  to  save  responsibility  by  ascribing  to  the 
individual  the  indulgence  of  the  evil  passions  through  which 


WILL  IN  MENTAL  DERANGEMENT.         283 


the  Devil  gained  access  to  the  citadel.  It  is  the  same  old 
difficulty  always  coming  back  upon  us  in  different  guises 
and  under  different  names :  what  part  has  determinism, 
what  part  freewill,  in  human  doings  P 


SECTION  Y. 

DISORDEES    OF    WILL    IN    MENTAL    DEEANGEMENT. 

It  is  a  trite  enough  observation  that  nature  does  not  show 
anywhere  broad  lines  of  demarcation,  but  makes  everywhere 
easy  passage  from  one  class  of  things  to  another  by  gentle 
gradations,  so  that  between  the  least  things  and  the  greatest 
a  continuity  exists  throughout.  It  is  we  who  make  separate 
sciences,  in  consequence  of  the  constitution  of  our  faculties 
limiting  our  channels  of  apprehension  to  a  few  special  points 
of  contact  with  the  external :  we  divide  and  classify  in  order 
to  apprehend,  making  thus  a  sort  of  anatomy  of  nature.  But 
inasmuch  as  we  can  only  anatomise  the  dead,  and  as  nature 
certainly  is  not  dead  and  dividual  but  living  and  unity,  we 
perforce  sacrifice  or  lose  much  by  these  enforced  divisions. 
Could  we  comprehend  nature  as  a  whole,  which  however 
intelligence  co-extensive  with  it  could  alone  do,  the  meanest 
things  and  the  mightiest,  the  most  like  and  the  most  unlike, 
the  nearest  and  the  most  remote,  all  things  great  and  small 
would  be  perceived  to  be  bound  together  essentially  as  ele- 
ments of  one  mysterious  whole.  We  should  then  perceive  by 
an  instantaneous  intuition  how  necessary  an  issue  of  all  the 
operations  and  changes  of  matter  on  earth  from  the  begin- 
ning to  now  was  any  present  act  done  there — the  very  act 
for  example  which  I  perform  of  writing  the  word  that  I 
write  at  this  moment — and  foresee  in  it  all  the  possible 
operations  of  matter  in  time  to  come. 

Between  the  most  sanely  constituted  individual,  compact 
of  well-balanced  moral  feeling,  understanding  and  will,  and 
the  ill-constituted  individual  whom  all  the  world  is  agreed 
to  pronounce  mad,  there  are  beings  who  make  a  line  of  human 


284  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

continuation  from  the  one  to  the  other :  mediators  they 
might  be  called,  since  a  mediator  must  by  virtue  of  being 
it  share  the  natures  of  both  the  persons  or  classes  between 
which  he  mediates.  Near  the  borders  of  insanity  then,  yet 
not  actually  within  them,  we  meet  with  persons  some  of 
whom  it  is  not  easy  to  classify  :  persons  who  in  their  modes 
of  thought,  feeling  and  will  show  marked  peculiarities  or 
positive  eccentricities  which  make  them  remarked  as  unlike 
the  ordinary  run  of  men ;  who  have  in  fact  an  insane  tem- 
perament— that  is  to  say,  a  temperament  of  mind  which  be- 
speaks descent  from  a  family  in  which  insanity  exists,  which 
is  itself  a  predisposition  to  insanity,  and  which  betrays  itself 
in  odd  departures  from  the  common  standard  of  social  feeling 
and  conduct.  With  the  moral  peculiarities  go  in  extreme 
cases  some  peculiarities  of  bodily  features  and  functions,  such 
as  ill-shaped  or  unsymmetrical  head,  ill-formed  or  deformed 
ears,  squint,  stutterings  and  stammerings,  grotesquely  dis- 
cordant expressions  of  face — one  part  of  which  perhaps  looks 
serious  while  the  rest  is  wreathed  in  smiles — extreme  grim- 
acings,  especially  under  the  influence  of  excitement,  and 
other  nervous  distortions  of  features  that  occasion  disloca- 
tions of  the  ordinary  harmonies  of  expression,  and  that  are 
of  the  same  nature  as  the  dislocations  of  the  muscular  co- 
ordinations and  of  the  ordinary  associations  of  ideas;  but  in 
many  cases  there  is  nothing  more  noticeable  in  that  respect 
than  a  specially  marked  stamp  of  physiognomy  which  has 
been  fashioned  by  the  mood-marking  muscles  of  facial  expres- 
sion. In  the  lines  and  play  of  their  features,  in  fact,  and 
often  also  in  the  carriage,  attitudes  and  gestures  of  body, 
one  sees  moulded  the  predominant  traits  of  their  moral 
character. 

Without  going  into  details  which,  suitable  enough  in  a 
treatise  on  mental  pathology,  would  be  unsuitable  here,^  we 
find,  when  we  inquire  what  are  the  broad  features  of  this 
unsoundly  leavened  mental  temperament,  that  they  mark, 
first,  a  partial  degeneration  or  at  any  rate  an  incomplete 
sanity  of  moral  feeling,  and,  secondly,  a  corresponding  im- 
pairment or  incomplete  development  of  will.     That  is  what 

*  For  details  of  the  kind  I  refer  to  my  treatise  on  the  Pathology  of  Mind. 


WILL  IN  MENTAL  DEKANGEMENT.  285 

miglit  perhaps  have  been  foretold ;  for  if  a  temperament  is 

/  unsound  it  is  predisposed  to  degeneracy,  and  the  degeneracy, 
whether  it  be  into  madness  or  into  badness,  will  be  marked 

"^  by  some  defect  of  moral  feeling  and  will.  Not  that  the  pecu- 
liarity in  these  persons  commonly  reaches  a  depth  or  takes 
a  character  of  moral  decline  which  could  rightly  be  termed 
moral  degradation;  in  many  instances  it  is  rather  of  the 
nature  of  a  moral  eccentricity  or  a  moral  discord,  while  in 
others  it  consists  in  the  exaggerated  growth  of  some  parti- 
cular quality  of  character  which,  natural  in  temperate  develop- 
ment, in  excess  becomes  vice.    Vanity  grown  to  such  a  height 

/  as  to  lose  the  restraint  of  sanity ;  love  of  gain  developed  into 
an  extreme  avarice  and  miserliness ;  suspicion  and  distrust 
of  others  so  excessive  as  to  become  a  veritable  monomania ; 
a  mobile  impressionability  so  little  ballasted  by  logic  of  cha- 
racter or  training  as  to  present  a  perfect  exemplar  of  inco- 
herence of  thought  and  insincerity  of  feeling ; — these  and  the 
like  egoistic  tendencies  in  hypertrophied  growth  are  the 
tokens  of  the  deep  fault,  so  to  speak,  in  the  moral  disposi- 
tion.    The  fundamental  note  of  character  beneath  the  exces- 

^  sive  growths  is  an  intense  and  narrow  self-regarding  egoism : 
not  necessarily  a  deliberate,  conscious  selfishness,  but  an 
acute  self-feeling ;  a  constant  and  inveterate  reference  of  all 
impressions  to  self,  which  is  easily  touched  to  the  quick,  being 
what  is  called  very  sensitive,  as  well  it  may  be  when  all  its 
uensibilities  are  collected  into  one  sensitive  point  and  that 
point  self;  a  serene  and  exacting  assumption,  of  a  tacit  kind, 
that  what  is  important  to  him  is  or  ought  to  be  of  equal  mo- 
ment to  all  the  world  and  a  corresponding  exacting  demand 
on  the  services  of  others,  without  any  sense  of  obligation  or 
gratitude ;  a  sheer  incapacity  to  conceive  the  insignificance 
of  self  in  the  economy  of  the  whole  and  to  view  it  and  its 
relations  objectively.  The  one  thing  a  person  of  this  kind 
cannot  do  is  to  objectify  himself — to  surmount  seK  by  a 
humorous  criticism  of  self.  It  is  impossible  for  him  to 
believe,  as  he  gets  to  the  worst,  that  he  and  his  concerns  do 
not  or  ought  not  to  fill  as  large  a  place  in  other  people's 
thoughts  as  they  do  in  his  own,  who,  he  may  come  to  per- 
suade himself  at  last,  are  thinking  or  speaking  ill  of  him, 


286  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

scheming  and  plotting  against  liim,  ridiculing  and  shunning 
him,  and  the  like. 

These  excessive  growths  of  egoism  which  put  the  indi- 
vidual out  of  sound  and  wholesome  relations  with  his  fellows, 
and  so  far  isolate  him,  exemplify  very  well  the  difficulty  of 
attaining  to  and  maintaining  the  right  equilibrium  between 
a  development  of  individual  tendencies  and  a  just  regard  to 
the  influence  of  the  social  medium :  too  much  influenced 
from  without,  there  is  an  end  of  spontaneity  and  he  becomes 
little  more  than  an  automatic  piece  in  the  social  mechanism ; 
too  little  influenced  from  without,  individuality  is  apt  to  run 
into  an  excess  which  verges  on  madness  in  extreme  cases, 
and  in  all  cases  lacks  the  wholesome  discipline  and  support 
that  are  got  by  growth  against  resistance  and  are  essential 
to  its  best  development.     Vanity  is  a  passion  which  is  of 
social  origin,  springing  from  a  love  of  the  admiration  or 
praise  of  the  kind,  and  so  far  is  a  useful  force  in  the  social 
organisation,  since  it  spurs  the  individual  to  gain  what  it 
pleases  his  vanity  to  have ;    although  intensely  egoistic  in 
character,  it  is  altruistic  in  the  source  of  its  sanction  as 
an  incentive  of   conduct,  and   altruistic   also   in    the  self- 
sacrificing    energies  which   it   sometimes   inspires,  since  a 
person  may  risk  what  he  values  most,  even  life  itself,  out  of 
an  exalted  vanity;    so  it  has  an  intermediate   and   useful 
position   between   the  more  purely  egoistic  and   the  more 
purely  altruistic   feelings.      Its   social   significance   is  well 
shown  by  two  reflections — first,  that  the  vainest  mortal  does 
not  look  for  the  admiration  of  his  horse,  and,  secondly,  that 
his  horse  does  not  look  for  the  admiration  and  flattery  of  its 
kind.     But  vanity,  like  other  egoistic  passions,  cannot  ever 
obtain  its  completest  gratification  if  it  is  too  self-regarding ; 
for  it  then  defeats  its  own  end  of  attracting  praise  and 
admiration,  and  brings  on  its  possessor  dispraise,  ridicule 
and  contempt.     It  is  a  quality  which,  in  order  to  discharge 
its  function  well,  must  not  grow  beyond  a  certain  mean  ;  the 
further  it  exceeds  that  measure  the  further  it  puts  the  indi- 
vidual as  a  social  element  out  of  the  reach  of  the  controlling, 
modifying,  directing  and  inspiring  influences  of  the  social 
organisation ;  until  at  last  he  becomes  a  positive  morbid  ele- 


WILL  IN  MENTAL  DERANGEMENT.  287 

jnent,  useless  or  injurious  in  it.  That  we  see  to  be  the  ten- 
dency and  foresee  to  be  the  probable  outcome  of  the  narrow, 
intense,  excessive  vanity  of  the  insane  temperament.  Envy 
again,  another  passion  of  social  origin,  has  an  innocent  side  in 
~"  so  far  as  it  stirs  the  individual  to  exertion  in  order  to  emulate 
7  him  whom  he  envies ;  but  when  it  is  suffered  to  grow  rank 
and  malignant  in  the  mind  it  corrodes  the  strength  and  eats 
out  the  goodness  of  character.  So  also  with  regard  to  the 
feeling  of  suspicion,  which  is  a  natural  function  in  a 
complex  social  state ;  for  it  is  certain  that  without  it  no 
one  would  be  able  to  conduct  his  life  successfully  in  the 
midst  of  a  crowd  of  self- regarding  elements  many  of  them 
justly  deserving  to  be  suspected.  Held  in  due  balance  by 
the  sense  of  surrounding  checks  and  assimilating  their 
influence,  it  is  beneficial;  suffered  to  grow  to  excess,  in 
disregard  of  the  restraining,  consolidating,  and  strengthen- 
ing forces   of  the  social  medium,  it  runs  into  a  mania  of 

/ suspicion  that  cuts  the  individual  off  from  communion  with 

his  kind,  and  becomes  truly  insanity.       It  is   unfortunate 

that  while  the  virtues  of  the  mean  in  the  general  are  evident 
enough,  the  real  difficulty  is  to  find  and  to  keep  it  in  the 
particular,  seeing  that  it  is  always  relative ;  the  virtue  of  one 
social  medium  being  the  vice  of  another,  the  faith  of  to-day 

^ the  fable  of  to-morrow. 

As  it  has  undoubtedly  been  the  effect,  we  may  say  that 
it  has  been  the  aim,  of  the  social  union  of  men  to  facilitate  by 
mutual  help  the  satisfaction  of  their  fundamental  or  primary 
wants — that  is  to  say,  the  food-want,  the  sexual  want,  and 
one  may  perhaps  add  the  clothing-want ;  and  the  condition 
and  effect  of  such  union  ha,ve  necessarily  been,  as  I  have 
already  pointed  out,  a  certain  repression  of  the  personal  or 
egoistic  element,  since  the  individual  must  needs  conform  to 
restraints  on  his  primary  passions  in  order  to  have  the 
benefits  of  co-operation  and  even  to  render  it  possible.  But 
a  further  and  more  remote  effect  of  the  increasing  social 
complexity  is  to  bring  the  personal  element  again  into  active 
development  through  the  manifold  secondary  interests, 
ambitions,  passions  that  are  engendered  in  the  complex 
social  state — those  social  egoisms  which  are  the  less  crude, 


288  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

but  not  less    selfish,   social   developments  of   tlie   primary 
passions.     Personal  gratification  no  longer  seeks  or  attains 
its  aim  in  the  mere  satisfaction  of  physical  wants ;  it  has  to 
seek  and  attain  them  in  a  social  medium  by  social  means 
and  in  social  advantages ;    and  so  it  is  that  pure  egoism 
necessai'ily   undergoes    social   transformations   in    spite   of 
itself.      It   appears   then  that   egoistic   and   altruistic   are 
terms  which  mark  too  abrupt  a  division  when  they  are  set 
over  against  one  another  to  signify  opposite  and  unrelated 
passions :  for  egoism  cannot  operate  in  the  social  sphere  to 
its  own  advantage  except  by  putting  on  the  form  of  altruism. 
Now  the  constant  tendency  of  the  personal  element  is  to 
inspire   and   urge    to   undue   gratification   these   secondary 
passions  that  are  developed  out  of  the  social  union.     Hence 
the  difl&culty,  nay  the  impossibility,  of  keeping  a  society  pure ; 
hence  indeed  an  inevitable  tendency  in  itself  to  breed  cor- 
ruption.      Selfish   devotion   to    pleasure,    eager  pursuit   of 
wealth  without  the   least    regard    to   the   oppression   and 
misery  that  the   pursuit   may  entail   on  others,  unworthy 
ambitions  of   power  and  place   and   the  use  of  unworthy 
means  to  attain  them,  guile  and  fraud  in  business,  enerva- 
ting luxury  and  effeminacy,  decadence  of  public  spirit,  all 
the  elements  of  decay  that  mark  the  decline  of  a  society 
and  go  before  its  destruction, — these  are  the  outcomes  of  an 
excessive  egoism  in  its  social  developments.     Obviously  their 
tendencies  are  not  to  social  consolidation  but  to  social  dis- 
ruption :  without  the  sentiment  of  human  solidarity  intellect 
and  power  are  selfish  and  disintegrant.     In  the  social  fusion 
of  egoistic  energies,  however  complete,  there  is  always  latent 
a   disruptive   or   explosive  disposition,   as  we  may  plainly 
understand  there  must  be  if  their  natural  repulsions  have 
been  constrained  under  tremendous  pressure  to  efface  them- 
selves in  the  development  of  affinities :  it  is  a  tendency  of 
them   to   get   free,    which    gains    force   rapidly   when   the 
STU-roundings  are  not  favourable  to  the  maintenance  of  the 
social  solidarity,  and  which  in  any  case  has  its  way  in  the 
end.     For  a  society  cannot   any  more  than  an  individual 
continue  to  develope  for  ever,  or  for  ever  continue  in  one  stay. 
In  its  primary  forms  of  crude  and  simple  passions  the 


DERANGEMENT.  289 

■'■^^   6' 
, /^necessary  repression   of  egoism  was   effected   only  by  the 

awful  terrors  of  superstition  and  by  tbe  most  rigorous  ex- 
>.  ecutive  measures  on  the  part  of  the  community  to  enforce 
conformity  to  the  tribal  or  national  customs  and  religions : 
what  is  there  available  to  do  a  like  needful  work  now  for 
the  secondary  social  egoisms  when  the  gods  have  one  after 
another  become  extinct  and  when  supernatural  terrors  have 
lost  nearly  all  their  force  ?  It  is  a  vastly  momentous  ques- 
sion  for  modem  societies,  and  they  will  hardly  solve  it  in 
the  best  way  by  going  on  as  if  it  will  never  need  to  be 
solved.  In  any  case  it  will  not  fail  to  solve  itself,  for 
assuredly  the  feeling  of  human  solidarity,  which  is  the  basis 
and  essence  of  religion  in  its  true  sense,  is  in  the  social 
organism  very  much  what  the  heart  is  in  the  bodily  organism : 
when  it  ceases  to  beat  there  corruption  and  death  begin. 
In  a  complex  social  state  the  individual  has  not,  it  is  true, 
_yery  great  power  singly  to  do  mischief,  be  his  aim  and  work 
never  so  selfish ;  if  he  is  to  spread  his  influence,  whether 
baneful  or  beneficial,  widely  he  must  work  in  combination 
with  others.  Hence  it  is  that  associations  and  societies  for 
co-operation  in  a  common  work  are  so  many  and  active  in 
^modern  communities.  Selfish  and  corrupt  men  find  it 
necessary  or  advantageous  to  unite  together  in  societies  or 
~T  companies  in  order  to  make  their  evil  gains  at  the  cost,  and 
'  oftentimes  to  the  iniin,  of  the  ignorant  and  the  unwary  whom 
they  delude  and  defraud.  Persons  of  the  same  trade, 
though  competing  eagerly  against  one  another,  join  in  the 
observance  of  a  common  trade-morality,  which  is  actually  an 
immorality,  being  a  sanctioned  fraudulent  combination 
against  the  community  under  the  guise  of  the  custom  of  the 
trade.  Too  often  the  modern  commercial  company  is  a 
signal  and  sad  example  of  the  social  union  of  bad  men  to 
extend  the  area  and  increase  the  power  of  their  entirely 
selfish  activity ;  and  the  pity  of  the  matter  is  that  the  ex- 
posure of  nefarious  schemes  that  have  overwhelmed  hun- 
dreds in  ruin  do  not  overwhelm  their  authors  in  infamy.  So 
it  is  made  evident  that  a  complex  society  breeds  in  itself  the 
morbid  elements  which  feed  on  it,  flourish  in  it,  and  in  the 
end  kill  it.     For  it  is  another  evil  of  the  social  system  of 


290  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

wliicli  such,  pernicious  antisocial  elements  are  bred  and  in 
which  they  flourish,  that  the  wrongdoer  mostly  goes  un- 
punished; the  appeal  of  his  victim  to  law  for  redress  is 
frustrated,  because  the  process  has  been  rendered  so  tedious, 
troublesome,  complex  and  costly,  by  the  exactions  of  many 
personal  interests  engaged  in  it,  as  to  make  it  a  less  suffering 
for  him  to  bear  wrongs  and  less  repugnant  to  allow  the 
guilty  to  go  free,  than  to  seek  an  uncertain  redress  by  that 
means ;  more  especially  when  the  appeal  has  to  be  made  to 
those  who  are  tainted  with  a  sympathy  for  such  commercial 
enterprises  and  cannot  see  the  iniquity  of  them. 

If  such  a  society  is  to  be  saved  from  corrupting  decay, 
nothing  but  a  revolution  of  some  kind  will  save  it ;  further 
evolution  will  only  be  the  evolution  of  further  elements  of 
dissolution.  The  ideal  which  it  worships  is  a  debased  and 
debasing  one,  not  truly  an  ideal,  but  in  reality  an  anti- ideal, 
and  it  sees  it  not.  The  only  salvation  then  lies  in  a  revolu- 
tion the  great  and  tragic  events  of  which,  sweeping  away 
conventionalisms  and  fusing  barren  and  obsolete  forms  in 
its  fire,  extinguish  ruthlessly  these  social  egoisms,  and 
bring  men  back  to  the  stern  realities  and  radical  principles 
of  human  association.  And  it  is  only  from  below  that  such 
effective  uprising,  if  it  comes  from  within  the  society,  can 
come.  There  would  appear,  however,  to  be  one  of  three 
events  which  may  happen  to  a  society  in  this  stage  of  germi- 
nating disruption,  as  Vice  pointed  out :  either  the  strong 
hand  of  a  dictator  or  Csesar  who,  making  himself  master, 
holds  interests  in  firm  check  and  gives  executive  force  to 
the  administration  of  paralysed  law;  or  subjugation  by  a 
nation  whose  strength  has  not  been  corrupted  by  luxury  and 
effeminacy,  and  which,  inferior  in  so-called  civilisation,  is  yet 
stronger  and  better,  in  so  far  as  it  is  able  to  conquer  and  to 
govern ;  or  lastly,  when  despot  and  conqueror  alike  fail,  civil 
strife  and  war  arising  out  of  excessive  personal  interests  and 
weakened  social  bonds — a  return  in  fact  to  a  waste  of  barbar- 
ism fro  mwhich  at  some  distant  day  new  life  may  spring.  It 
is  Bacon  who  makes  the  apt  comparison  of  such  disorganised 
and  expiring  commonwealths  to  '  the  streams  of  Helicon 
which  being  hid  under  the  earth  (until  the  vicissitude  of 


WILL  m  MENTAL  DERANGEMENT.  201 

tilings  passing)  break  out  again,  and  appear  in  some  other 
remote  nation,  though  not  perhaps  in  the  same  climate.' 

With  societies  as  with  individuals  it  is  not  intellect  that 
constitutes  character  and  will  save  their  souls  alive :  more 
_acute  intellect  will  only  be  a  keener  pursuit  of  selfish 
aims  if  there  be  not  beneath  it  a  sound  solidarity  of  social 
fpeling.  The  mere  lust  of  knowledge  is  no  better  in  itself 
than  the  mere  lust  of  power.  It  is  poor  progress  to  be  able 
to  move  over  the  earth  at  a  speed  ten  times  faster  than  our 
forefathers,  if  we  lose  our  forefathers'  simple  and  solid  social 
virtues  ;  no  great  thing  to  surpass  them  in  the  brilliancy  of 
electric  lighting,  if  we  get  no  better  moral  illumination.  Of 
all  foolish  labours  that  may  obtain  a  record  in  the  history  of 
humanity,  when  its  course  on  earth  is  run,  should  some 
higher  being  there  ever  write  the  tragical  story  down,  the 
most  ludicrously  abortive  will  be  seen  to  be  the  attempt  to 
build  up  a  stable  nation  on  a  gospel  of  smartness.  Any  one 
who  chooses  may  convince  himself  that  the  great  revolutions 
of  the  world  which  have  been  the  visible  beginnings  of  new 
eras  of  progress  did  not  spring  from  intellect  but  from  feel- 
ing; not  full}"^  formed,  Minerva-like,  from  the  scheming  head, 
but  by  slow  gestation  from  the  brooding  heart,  of  mankind. 
When  a  revolution  has  been  an  affair  of  the  understanding 
it  has  not  been  difl&cult  to  stop  it  by  cutting  off"  the  heads  of 
the  few  who  conspired,  but  when  a  revolution  has  been  bred 
in  the  hearts  of  the  people  it  has  not  been  stopped  by  cutting 
off  their  heads.  Underneath  the  surface-waves  of  national 
consciousness  which  show  themselves  in  the  traditions, 
opinions,  open  feelings,  institutions,  aims  of  a  people, 
there  are  in  the  deepest  fountains  of  its  cha/acter  a  great 
many  latent  energies  at  work ;  and  it  is  these  that  pursuing 
their  secret  and  silent  courses  in  infra-conscious  depths  really 
prepare  the  future  and,  when  their  waves  are  felt  on  the 
surface,  determine  its  course.  Manifesting  their  deep  pulses 
here  and  there  from  time  to  time  in  scattered  and  disorderly 
volcanic  upheavals  which  the  ignorant  ruler,  uninspired  by 
them,  despises,  so  making  ultimate  revolution  necessary,  but 
the  wise  ruler,  inspired  by  them,  takes  wise  account  of,  so 
making  evolution  gradual, — they  are  the  premonitory  beats 


292  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

of  a  movement  that,  coming  from  tlie  brooding  heart  of 
society,  lies  deeper  than  knowledge,  and  that  knowledge  will 
one  day  have  to  reckon  with. 

As  indeed  with  the  individual  so  it  is  with  humanity  as 
a  whole :  it  is  feeling  that  inspires  and  stirs  its  great  pulses, 
the  intellect  fashioning  the  moulds  into  which  the  feelings 
shall  flow.  If  you  ask  then  what  in  time  to  come  is  to 
break  to  pieces  the  rampant  egoisms  of  modern  society, 
and  to  bring  men  back  to  the  radical  principles  of  human 
solidarity,  seek  the  answer  in  a  calm  and  purely  scientific 
examination  of  such  scattered  upheavals  of  the  great 
sub-conscious  social  forces  as  take  place  from  time  to  time 
in  communistic,  socialistic,  nihilistic,  anarchic  outbreaks ; 
blind,  reckless,  wildly  visionary,  seemingly  insensate,  it 
is  true,  but  not  therefoi'e  meaningless — neither  causeless 
nor  without  final  cause ;  on  the  contrary,  pregnant  with  the 
deepest  meaniiig,  being  effects  of  what  is  in  weltering  ferment 
now  beneath  the  surface  and  forewarnings  of  what  will  be, 
either  catastrophically  or  gradually.^  There  will  be  a  grim 
experience  and  a  troubled  future  for  the  nation  that  has  not 
known,  before  that  hour  comes,  how  to  guide  these  forces  in 
the  right  way,  and  to  absorb  and  embody  them  in  fitting 
forms  of  social  and  political  organisation.  The  French  Ee- 
volution  was  momentous  enough  as  an  event,  but  it  is  per- 
haps more  so  as  an  awful  example  teaching  how  silently  the 
great  social  forces  mature,  how  they  explode  at  last  in  vol- 
canic fury,  if  too  much  or  too  long  repressed,  and  how  terrible 
and  apparently  meaningless  a  desolation  they  produce.  But 
not  meaningless  actually;  for,  as  mankind  is  constituted, 
human  progress  is  through  human  society,  and  these  devas- 
tating storms  are  the  revenge  which  the  evolutional  nisus 
takes  on  transgressed  laws  and  at  the  same  time  the  sweep- 
ing remedy  which  it  applies  to  a  rotten  social  organisation. 
It  is  anything  but  a  sign  of  vigorous  health  when  no  such 

'  Are  they  to  be  denounced,  deplored,  violently  suppressed  as  wildly 
insane,  because  they  appear  simply  destructive  ?  You  might  as  well  denounce, 
deplore,  and  violently  suppress  the  destructive  break-up  of  old  chemical  com- 
binations, because  you  cannot  foretell  the  new  and  higher  combinations  that 
.are  eventually  to  follow. 


WILL  m  MENTAL  DERANGEMENT.  293 

infra-conscious  energies  are  active  in  a  nation,  for  it  means 
that  the  evolutional  impulse  in  it  is  exhausted  and  decadence 
in  progress. 

To  return  from  this  endeavour  to  point  out  the  disruptive 
consequences  of  excessive  antisocial  egoisms  to  the  straight 
path  of  our  inquiry.  A  society  thoroughly  pervaded  by  sel- 
fish aims  and  pursuits  may,  like  an  individual  moved  by  pre- 
dominant egoisms,  go  on — the  former  for  several  generations, 
the  latter  perhaps  for  a  lifetime — without  showing  any  further 
tokens  of  degeneracy;  whereupon  the  passing  observer 
remarks  only  how  well  the  wicked  flourish.  But  let  him  pass 
by  in  succeeding  generations  and  things  shall  not,  perhaps, 
wear  so  flourishing  an  aspect.  The  antisocial  conditions  of 
one  generation  predetermine  the  social  disintegrations  of 
^  following  generations,  and  the  antisocial  egoistic  develop- 
i  T^  menfc  of  the  individual  predisposes  to,  if  it  does  not  predeter- 
Y  mine,  the  mental  degeneracy  of  his  progeny ;  he,  alien  from 
1  r~^s  kind  by  excessive  egoisms,  determines  an  alienation  of 
mind  in  them.  If  I  may  trust  in  that  matter  my  observations, 
/  1  know  no  one  who  is  more  likely  to  breed  insanity  in  his 
offspring  than  the  intensely  narrow,  self- sensitive,  suspicious, 
distrustful,  deceitful  and  self -deceiving  individual  who  never 
comes  into  sincere  and  sound  relations  with  men  and  things, 
who  is  incapable  by  nature  and  habit  of  genuinely  healthy 
communion  either  with  himself  or  with  his  kind.  A  moral 
development  of  that  sort  is  more  likely,  I  believe,  to  pre- 
determine insanity  in  the  next  generation  than  are  many 
forms  of  actual  mental  derangement  in  parents ;  for  the 
whole  moral  nature  is  essentially  infected,  and  that  goes 
deeper  down,  and  is  more  dangerous,  qua  heredity,  than  a 
particular  derangement :  a  mental  alienation  is  the  natural 
pathological  evolution  of  it.  Once  more,  then,  we  perceive 
how  deterioration  of  moral  feeling  proves  itself  to  be  an  initial 
mark  of  degeneracy,  by  the  distinct  mental  degeneracy  which 
it  produces  when  it  has  free  course. 

It  goes  without  saying  that  the  best  will  cannot  coexist 
with  such  unsound  moral  dispositions  as  I  have  described 
under  the  name  of  insane  temperament.  True  it  is  that 
they  present  sometimes  that  thin,  shrill,  eager,  intense  will 


i' 


294  THE  PATHOLOGY   OF  WILL. 

■which,  inspired  by  passion,  is  a  sort  of  spasmodic  self-will, 
but  we  do  not  observe  that  calm,  full,  strong,  free  will  which 
comes  of  large  and  true  appreciation  of  external  relations 
and  of  just  co-ordination  of  thoughts,  feelings,  and  desires. 
Moreover,  we  meet  sometimes  with  most  remarkable  instances 
of  singular  impotencies  and  perversions  of  will  among  per- 
sons who  have  this  insane  temperament.  A  thought  of  a 
painful  kind  or  an  impulse  to  do  some  absurd  or  wrong  act 
arises  in  the  mind  and  keeps  its  footing  there,  despite  the 
most  earnest  desire  to  get  rid  of  it;  thrust  into  the  back- 
ground for  a  moment  by  the  urgent  call  of  present  interests 
or  duties,  it  returns  again  and  again  to  the  front  at  the  first 
chance,  getting  at  last  such  a  hold  of  the  mind  that  the 
alarmed  individual,  who  feels  himself  demoniacally  possessed 
by  it,  is  brought  to  a  state  of  extreme  horror  and  distress. 
Ludicrous  as  the  tale  of  his  sufferings  seems  in  the  telling  of 
it,  even  to  himself,  it  causes  au  unrest  and  anguish  of  mind 
which  are  far  from  being  ludicrous ;  for  the  sense  of  having 
lost  hold  of  himself,  of  being  at  the  mercy  of  an  internal 
impulse  which  is  not  himself,  the  alarming  apprehension  that 
he  may  in  an  unguarded  moment  some  day  yield  to  an  insti- 
gation which  it  costs  him  all  his  strength  of  watchful  will  to 
withstand,  the  awful  feeling  of  a  disruption  of  self  and  the 
appalling  dissolution  of  self-confidence  that  accompanies  it, 
— these  produce  an  abiding  distress  and  at  times  an  inde- 
scribable despair.  Even  when  the  idea  or  impulse  is  in 
momentary  abeyance,  present  enjoyment  is  hindered  and 
the  pleasure  of  hope  frustrated  by  the  overhanging  dread  of 
its  recurrence. 

Here  then  we  are  presented  with  a  very  remarkable  dis- 
integration of  will  in  one  who  is  certainly  not  insane  in  the 
sense  of  having  lost  his  reason,  seeing  that  he  is  clearly  con- 
scious of  the  nature  of  his  affliction  and  able  to  reason  quite 
as  justly  about  it  as  any  one  need  be,  but  who  is  not  sane  in 
the  sense  of  having  a  sound  and  compact  union  of  well- 
balanced  nerve-centres  as  the  basis  of  his  mental  organisa- 
tion, and  the  consequent  power  over  himself  which  would 
come  of  such  a  union.  This  native  weakness,  the  outcome 
of  which  is  a  divided  will — a  dread  of  willing  in  obedience  to 


WILL  IN  MENTAL  DERANGEMENT.  295 

a  rebellious  impulse  of  self  that  which  the  larger  and  truer 
self  would  not  will — is  with  him  a  matter  of  inheritance 
mainly,  but  a  similar  condition  of  nervous  system  is  some- 
times brought  about  by  special  nerve-enervating  causes. 
Whatever  be  the  intimate  and  hidden  molecular  conditions, 
it  is  plain  that  the  bonds  of  association  between  the  different 
nervous  centres  that  together  constitute  the  mental  organisa- 
tion are  so  weakened  as  no  longer  to  exert  the  inhibitive  in- 
fluence necessary  to  keep  them  in  their  natural  equilibrium 
and  make  them  act  together  in  perfect  unison.  The  result  is 
much  like  that  which  befalls  when  a  particular  muscle  or  a 
set  of  muscles  in  a  physiological  group  or  series  betakes 
itself,  in  consequence  of  disorder  of  the  proper  nerve-centres, 
to  independent  action  against  a  person's  will  and  occasions 
the  sort  of  mutinous  movement  we  call  choreic  :  it  is  a  kind 
of  St.  Vitus's  dance  of  the  idea  or  impulse.  The  movement 
is  perhaps  distressing  to  him  in  the  highest  degree,  but  he 
cannot  hinder  it ;  the  more  he  tries  to  do  so,  and  the  more 
he  thinks  about  it,  the  worse  it  is.  There  is  a  functional 
dissolution  of  the  mental  organisation,  a  disruption  of  the 
solidarity  of  its  associated  centres,  the  consequence  of  which 
is  a  decomposition  or  disintegration  of  will.  For  the  will 
means,  as  I  have  already  shown,  the  conscious  expression  of 
the  co-ordination  of  mental  functions  working  to  an  end  : 
that  co-ordination  imperfect,  will  is  imperfect ;  impaired, 
will  is  impaired  ;  exact  and  complete,  will  reaches  its  high- 
est quality  and  energy,  its  highest  functional  expression,  in 
the  particular  person.  Disruption  of  co-ordination  is  de- 
composition of  will ;  decomposition  of  will  is  dissolution  of 
self ;  dissolution  of  self  before  it  is  so  great  as  to  entail  the 
actual  loss  of  normal  consciousness — that  is  to  say,  when  it 
is  impending  and  forefelt  rather  than  actual  and  present — 
is  accompanied  by  the  most  alarming  shock  to  self-con- 
fidence. 

So  much  then  concerning  the  special  features  of  that 
unsoundly  tempered  character  which,  stopping  short  of 
actual  insanity,  is  yet,  as  it  were,  the  premonition  of  it.  Its 
peculiarity  being  a  native  deficience  of  mental  co-ordination 
and   a  consequent  tendency  to  separate   and  inco-ordinate 


296  THE  PATHOLO&Y  OF  WILL. 

action  of  parts — a  neurosis  spasmodica,  as  I  have  elsewhere 
described  it,  which  translates  itself  in  consciousness  as  a  con- 
vulsive psychosis — as  distempered  moral  feeling  and  dismem- 
bered will — it  is  obvious  that  any  enervating  cause  reducing 
still  lower  the  natural  energy  of  such  a  mental  organisation 
will  easily  occasion  those  more  serious  disorders  of  function 
which  are  recognised  as  positive  mental  derangement. 
There  is  no  reserve  power  in  the  background  available  to 
counterbalance  the  exhausting  conditions,  and  the  degeneracy 
runs  quickly  down  to  complete  anarchy.  Herein  we  may 
discern  the  explanation  of  three  events  which  claim  notice  in 
the  clinical  history  of  hereditary  madness :  the  first  is  the 
ease  and  rapidity  with  which  the  malady  passes  from  its 
beginnings  into  a  display  of  extreme  incoherence  ;  the  second 
is  the  like  rapidity  with  which  recovery  takes  place  some- 
times from  an  extreme  and  almost  hopeless  looking  incoher- 
ence, an  equilibrium  easily  upset  being  easily  restored  ;  and 
the  third  is  the  rapidity  with  which,  when  recovery  does  not 
take  place,  the  disease  runs  down  into  an  extreme  and  hope- 
less dementia — the  easily  induced  functional  disorder  of  the 
first  event  lapsing  quickly  into  the  organic  deterioration  of 
the  last  event.  The  essentially  weak  or  unstable  constitu- 
tion either  of  nerve-element  itself  or  of  the  organised  associa- 
tion of  nerve-centres,  or  of  both — the  first  being  perhaps  a 
main  condition  of  the  production  of  the  second — in  persons 
who  have  a  strong  hereditary  predisposition  to  madness  is 
shown  furthermore  by  the  fact  that  a  similar  condition  of 
things,  betraying  itself  by  similar  symptoms,  is  produced 
sometimes  by  active  nerve-exhausting  causes  in  persons  who 
have  not  up  to  that  time  shown  any  noticeable  signs  of  such 
a  predisposition. 

The  briefest  survey  of  the  main  features  of  the  leading 
forms  of  mental  derangement  is  enough  to  show  that  a 
loss  of  power  over  the  thoughts,  feelings,  and  acts  is  an 
essential  fact  of  the  anarchy.  Not  that  the  afilicted  person 
is  himself  distressed  usually  by  this  failure  of  will,  or  even 
so  much  as  aware  of  it ;  on  the  contrary,  so  far  from  being 
unhappy  is  he  that  oftentimes  he  is  jubilant  in  the  exulting 
consciousness  of  a  glorious  power  of  intellect  and  of  a  freedom 


D 


WILL  IN  MENTAL  DEEANGEMENT.         297 

of  will  wliicli  he  never  experienced  before.  However,  if  we, 
distrusting  this  exultant  declaration  of  self-consciousness,  __ 
set  ourselves  to  watch  him  attentively,  we  soon  perceive 
that  it  is  innocently  playing  a  gross  deception  on  him  ;  it  is 
the  true  witness  to  an  exuberant  activity  of  a  sort,  but  by 
no  means  a  competent  witness  to  the  quality  of  the  activity, 
for  it  is  inevitably  suborned  to  testify  directly  as  it  is  directly 
inspired.  Before  he  has  actually  fallen  into  mania,  indeed 
while  he  is  displaying  the  pre  maniacal  semblance  of  mental 
brilliancy  that  is  often  so  signal  a  feature  of  the  beginning 
of  the  attack,  it  is  plain  that  thoughts  and  feelings  surge  up 
in  his  mind  in  an  irregular  and  tumultuous  fashion,  and 
impel  him  to  strange  and  disorderly  acts.  There  is  manifest 
an  extraordinary  mobility  of  ideas  and  feelings  for  a  short 
time  before  the  stage  of  actual  incoherence  is  reached : 
instant,  abrupt,  and  rapid  transitions  from  subject  to  subject 
without  a  following  up  of  the  natural  aflSnities  or  sequences 
of  any  subject ;  no  restrained  excitation  of  the  proper  acces- 
sory ideas,  supplemental  or  complemental,  to  complete  the 
grasp  of  the  perception  or  of  the  conception,  which  therefore 
is  only  partially  formed  in  the  mind,  but  instant  and  promis- 
cuous excitation  and  discharge  of  ideational  centres  or  tracks 
that  receive  and  react  with  amazing  rapidity  ;  a  correspond- 
ing instability  of  moods  shown  by  quick  and  abrupt  transi- 
tions through  the  gamut  of  feeling  from  expansive  amity 
and  effusive  cordiality  to  angry  suspicion  and  menace  with- 
out any  external  provocation ;  a  restless  change  of  movements 
answering  in  some  measure  to  the  rapid  changes  of  ideas 
and  moods.  Obviously  the  natural  inter-restraints  or  inhi- 
bitions of  the  mental  nerve-centres  have  been  impaired  or 
abolished ;  instead  of  one  of  them  when  stirred  to  function 
being  held  in  due  balance  by  another  that  would  naturally 
offer  such  a  resistance,  the  effect  seems  to  be  a  quick  and 
easy  inter-stimulation,  not  perhaps  unlike  that  which  persons 
exert  upon  one  another  in  a  crowd  inflamed  by  fear,  fury,  _\/_2/ 
or  fanaticism.  Instantaneous  makings  and  breakings  of 
thought-circuits,  and  the  makings,  no  sooner  made  than 
unmade,  of  all  sorts  of  accidental  connections,  are  the  order, 

or  rather  disorder,  of  events.     We  may  conclude  that  the 
20 


wr"^ 


298  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

symptoms  mark  two  stages  of  degeneration,  though  at 
bottom  perhaps  these  are  degrees  of  the  same  process :  first, 
an  excitation  of  nerve-element  whereby  the  sensitivity  of  the 
centres  and  the  conductivity  of  the  inter-connecting  paths 
are  extraordinarily  increased,  so  that  quick,  varied  and 
transient  associations  of  flashing  ideas,  often  only  half  com- 
plete, give  a  momentary  semblance  of  mental  brilliancy ;  and, 
secondly,  as  the  disorder  increases,  a  further  impairment  of 
the  natural  stability  of  the  associated  centres,  so  that  disturb- 
ance of  equilibrium  passes  readily  and  quickly  from  one  to 
another  without  meeting  with  any  resistance,  and  there  ensues 
a  general  and  tumultuous  incoherence.  Here,  if  we  consider 
it,  appears  the  truth  of  the  old  saying  that  anger  is  a  short 
madness,  especially  in  those  persons  whose  ideational  centres 
have  naturally  quick  sensibilities  and  little  inhibitivities,  if 
I  may  coin  such  an  uncouth  word ;  for  in  that  respect  it  is 
certain  that  there  exist  very  great  constitutional  differences, 
in  one  person  any  outbreak  of  anger  being  an  actual  inco- 
herence, while  another  is  hardly  ever  transported  out  of 
himself  b}--  rage,  although  in  most  persons  a  furious  passion 
is  more  or  less  incoherent. 

It  is  curious  and  instructive  to  watch  the  struggle  which 
is  taking  place  sometimes  in  the  mind  at  the  beginning 
of  acute  mania,  before  the  undermined  will  is  completely 
shattered.  We  may  observe  the  patient  succeed  by  a  mani- 
fest effort  in  bringing  himself  under  its  control  for  a  few 
moments  when  he  is  aware  that  some  one  is  watching  him, 
or  when  he  is  spoken  with  or  sharply  remonstrated  with ; 
collecting  himself  on  the  instant  he  speaks  and  acts  in  a 
calm,  measured,  and  coherent  style,  as  if  after  grave  deli- 
beration, although  he  is  under  an  evident  strain ;  but  it 
is  an  over-strain  that  he  cannot  keep  up,  for  the  enfeebled 
will  soon  lets  go  the  reins  and  he  relapses  into  a  turmoil 
of  incoherent  thought,  speech,  and  conduct,  becoming,  as 
the  disease  makes  progress,  incapable  of  a  moment's  real 
self-control.  In  saying  that  the  will  lets  go  the  reins,  I 
employ  a  metaphorical  expression  that  properly  befits  the 
abstract  psychologist  only ;  what  is  concretely  meant  is 
that  the  increase  of  the  inco-ordinate  and  separate  action 


0 


WILL  IN  MENTAL  DERANGEMENT.  299 


of  tile  supreme  centres  is  the  deepening  disintegration  of 
will. 

Take  another  variety  of  madness :  the  person  who  is 
suflfering  from  that  deep  moi'bid  gloom  of  mind  which  is 
called  melancholia — a  gross  exaggeration  of  ordinary  melan- 
choly, as  mania  is  a  gross  exaggeration  of  ordinary  anger — 
finds  perhaps  some  painful  thought,  blasphemous,  obscene, 
or  otherwise  afflicting,  come  into  his  mind  against  his 
earnest  wish,  causing  him  unspeakable  distress,  and  hold  its 
ground  there  in  spite  of  all  the  efforts  of  an  agitated  and 
enfeebled  will  to  expel  it ;  so  hateful  an  intruder  is  it,  so 
alien  to  his  feelings,  so  repugnant  to  him,  so  independent  of 
his  true  self,  that,  unable  to  account  for  it  naturally,  he  ends 
perhaps  by  ascribing  it  to  the  direct  inspiration  of  Satan,  to 
whom  he  believes  himself  abandoned  because  of  the  enormity 
of  his  sins.  Or  he  may  be  afflicted  with  a  frequently  up- 
starting impulse  to  do  harm  to  himself  or  to  others,  conscious 
all  the  while  of  the  horrible  nature  of  the  impulse  which  he 
resists  with  frenzied  energy,  and  going  through  agonies  of 
distress  during  the  paroxysms  of  its  activity,  and  the  struggles 
that  he  makes  to  prevent  his  true  will  being  overmastered 
by  it. 

The  monomaniac  broods  over  some  idea  of  greatness  or 
of  suspicion,  rooted  in  its  congenial  feeling  of  vanity  or  sus- 
picion and  drawing  to  itself  the  sympathetic  nourishment  of 
like-kinded  ideas  and  feelings,  until  the  weakened  will  loses 
restraining  hold  of  it,  and  it  grows  to  the  height  of  an  insane 
delusion.  It  is  an  instance  of  the  disruption  of  the  solidarity 
of  the  mental  nerve-centres :  first,  by  a  concentrated  or 
predominant  function  of  one  group  of  them,  and  subsequently 
by  an  excessive  development  or  hypertrophy  of  that  group, 
so  to  speak;  and  with  these  conditions  goes  a  corresponding 
breach  of  the  integrity  of  will,  functional  and  remediable  in 
the  first,  organic  and  for  the  most  part  irremediable  in  the 
second,  event.  Here  again  it  is  curious  and  interesting  to 
watch  the  alternating  pi'edominance  of  the  true  and  the 
insane  self  at  the  outset  of  the  degenei-acy,  according  as  the 
individual  is  or  is  not  under  the  sway  of  his  delusion,  and 
the  sort  of  struggle  for  existence  that  is  going  on  between 


300  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

them  ;  in  the  good  event  of  recovery  the  sane  self  gradually 
gains  the  day  and  he  emerges  into  clear  consciousness ;  in 
the  bad  event  of  deterioration,  the  insane  self  carries  the 
day,  and  he  imagines  himself,  if  of  optimistic  temperament, 
prophet,  king  or  other  great  personage,  or  believes,  if  pessi- 
mistic, that  the  whole  world  is  in  a  conspiracy  against  him. 
Whatever  the  event,  it  is  an  example  of  the  survival  of  the 
fittest :  the  fixed  delusion  is  the  fit  pathological  develop- 
ment of  the  naturally  weak  and  vain  temperament  which 
withdraws  from  the  discipline  of  facts  into  an  unwholesome 
indulgence  of  egoisms ;  the  return  to  sanity  is  the  proper 
self-assertion  of  a  stronger  and  sounder  natural  temperament 
which  is  capable  of  coming  into  wholesome  relations  with 
its  surroundings.  Were  I  called  upon  to  compress  into  one 
short  precept  the  essence  of  the  best  rules  to  be  observed  in 
order  to  prevent  the  development  of  such  an  insanity,  I 
should  be  tempted  to  say  to  the  individual.  Learn  to  think 
yourself  no  less  a  fool  than  anybody  whom  you  think  a  fool. 
Everywhere  then  we  observe  impaired  will  to  mark  the 
beginnings  of  mental  derangement,  and  efiaced  will  to  mark 
its  last  and  worst  stages.  For  when  we  contemplate  the  sad 
spectacle  of  its  last  term,  as  we  are  confronted  with  it  in  the 
utterly  demented  person  in  whom  all  traces  of  mind  are  well- 
nigh  extinguished,  who  must  be  fed,  washed,  dressed  by 
others,  cared  for  in  every  way,  being  incapable  of  any  care 
of  himself,  whose  life  is  little  more  than  a  mere  vegetative 
existence,  we  see  plainly  a  complete  abolition  of  rational 
will  go  along  with  the  complete  mental  disorganisation.  Is 
there  behind  this  degraded  matter,  and  struggling  in  vain  to 
utter  itself,  a  soul  of  the  same  substance  and  quality  as  that 
of  the  philosopher  ? 


SECTION  VI. 

THE    DISINTEGRATIONS   OF   THE    '  EGO.' 

A  DILIGENT  study  of  the  facts  of  mental  pathology  would  do 
_the  pure  psychologist  a  real  service,  if  it  moved  him  to  obtain 
and  frame  for  himself  some  kind  of  notion  of  the  material 
conditions  of  things  which  he  concedes  to  run  parallel  with 
the  divers  will-energies,  albeit  he  might  continue  to  uphold 
the  self-sufficingness  of  his  introspective  method.  Why  not 
resolve  to  have  a  dejS.nite  mental  representation  of  the  two 
invariably  and  essentially  parallel  processes,  when  he  has 
occasion  to  think  of  either  ?  It  would  be  an  excellent  check 
on  vagueness  of  thought  and  expression,  for  it  would  help 
him  to  feel  that  he  has  a  definite  meaning  in  the  abstract  and 
somewhat  empty  psychological  terms  which  he  uses  so  freely, 
and  to  make  others  feel  it,  and  would  perhaps  render  his 
use  of  them  a  little  more  deliberate,  exact,  and  sparing. 
Nor  would  it  be  amiss  by  way  of  gaining  a  conception  of 
the  nature  of  the  mental  organisation,  and  of  the  expression 
of  its  co-ordinate  functions  in  will,  to  reflect  at  the  same 
time  on  the  solidarity  that  exists  between  the  various  parts 
of  a  complex  State,  ideally  well  ordered  and  well  governed, 
whereby  the  executive  action  is  the  full  and  faithful  repre- 
sentation of  all  interests  in  their  due  subordinations  and 
co-ordinations;  or,  if  he  likes  better  to  go  down  to  the 
physiological  organism  than  upwards  to  the  social  organism 
for  a  helpful  illustration,  let  him  consider  the  wonderful 
sympathy  and  synergy  of  organs  there,  and  ask  himself  if 
they  would  do  their  work  so  well  had  they  the  disturbing 
gift  of  consciousness.  This  in  any  case  he  should  not  fail 
to  apprehend :  that  in  that  exquisitely  fine  and  intricately 
complex  organisation  which  is  the  physical  basis  of  mind 
every  interest  of  the  entire  body,  every  organic  energy,  has 
direct  or  indirect  representation :  there  is  nothing  in  the 
outermost  that  is  not,  so  to  speak,  represented  in  the  inner- 
most. Not  one  organ  but  all  organs,  not  one  structure  but 
all  structures,  not  one  movement  but  all  movements,  not  one 


302  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

feeling  "but  all  feelings  ;  all  vibrations  of  energy,  of  what  sort 
soever,  from  all  parts  of  the  body,  the  nearest  and  the  most 
remote,  the  meanest  and  most  noble,  conscious  and  infra- 
conscious  ; — stream  into  the  unifying  centre  and  make  their 
felt  or  unfelt  contributions  to  the  outcome  of  conscious 
function.  The  brain  is  the  central  organ  of  the  bodily 
synthesis,  sympathy,  and  synergy,  and  the  will  at  its  best 
the  supreme  expression  of  that  unity.  Therefore  it  is  that 
^  "^  in  will  is  contained  character :  not  character  of  mind  only, 
as  commonly  understood,  but  the  character  of  every  organ 
of  the  body,  the  consentient  functions  of  which  enter  into 
the  full  expression  of  individuality. 

That  being  so,  it  is  made  evident  that  disorganisation  of 
the  union  of  the  supreme  cerebral  centres  must  be  a  more  or 
less  dissolution  of  the  conscious  self,  the  ego,  according  to 
the  depth  of  the  damage  to  the  physiological  unity.  Even 
if  any  one  organ  of  the  body  be  defective,  it  is  a  breach  in 
the  supreme  unity  of  consciousness,  for  it  is  a  deprivation  to 
the  extent  of  its  deficient  energy,  and  a  disturbance  to  the 
degree  that  its  work  is  thrown  upon  other  organs :  it  is  like 
a  horse  in  a  team  that  does  not  do  its  exact  share  of  the 
work  uniformly.  The  constant  feeling  of  personal  identity 
on  which  metaphysicians  lay  so  much  stress  as  a  fundamental 

f  intuition  of  consciousness,  discerning  in  it  the  incontestable 
touch  and  proof  of  a  spiritual  ego  which  they  cannot  get 
into  actual  contact  with  in  any  other  way,  may  be  expected 
to  be  sometimes  wavering  and  uncertain,  in  other  cases 
divided  and  discordant,  and  in  extreme  cases  extinguished. 
But  that  is  a  dismayful  expectation  to  entertain  concerning 
the  *  I,*  the  '  ego  ' — the  ens  unum  et  semper  cognitum  in  omni- 
bus notitiis — of  which  they  thus  protest  we  have  more  or  less 
clear  consciousness  in  every  exercise  of  intelligence.  Look 
frankly  then  at  the  facts  and  see  what  conclusion  they 
warrant.  Is  there  the  least  sign  of  a  consciousness  of  his 
ego  in  the  senseless,  speechless,  howling,  slavering,  dirty, 
"VT"" defenceless,  and  utterly  helpless  idiot,  whose  defective 
cerebral  centres  are  incapable  of  responding  to  such  weak 
and  imperfect  impressions  as  his  dull  senses  are  able  to 
convey,  and  incapable  of  any  association  of  the  few,  dim  and 


DISINTEGRATIONS  OF  THE  'EGO.'         ^'  303  '" 


vague  impressions  tliat  he  does  receive  ?  No  doubt  his  body, 
so  long  as  it  holds  together  by  the  ministering  cai'C  of  others, 
may  be  said  to  be  an  ego  or  self;  but  from  the  human  stand- 
point what  a  self!     It  is  not  a  mental  ego,  since  the  central 

organic  mechanism  in  which  the  lower  bodily  energies  should 

__obtain  higher  representation,  and  mental  organisation  take 
place — the  before-  mentioned  synthesis,  sympathy,  and  synergy 
be  effected — is  either  altogether  wanting  or  hopelessly  ill 
constructed.  The  miserable  specimen  of  degeneracy  does 
not  and  cannot  therefore  in  the  least  know  that  he  is  a  self, 
or  feel  that  a  human  self  is  degraded  in  him.  If  the  sure 
and  certain  proof  of  a  soul  existing  independent  of  the  organ- 
ism, and  the  thereupon  based  sure  and  certain  hope  of  a 
resurrection  to  life  eternal,  be  the  distinct  and  permanent 
consciousness  of  identity  amongst  all  changes  and  chances 
of  mortal  structure,  it  is  certainly  a  mighty  pity  that 
the  proof  should  fail  us  in  the  very  case  in  which  its  certi- 
tude is  most  needed,  would  be  most  consoling  and  assuring, 
and  its  success  most  triumphant. 

While  the  idiot  yields  us  a  signal  example  of  the  depri- 
vation of  a  consciousness  of  self  the  records  of  mental 
pathology  yield  abundant  examples  of  its  derangements  or 
depravations.  What  shall  be  said  of  the  mean  person  born 
in  a  garret  and  bred  in  a  kitchen  who  has  never  gone 
beyond  the  dreary  routine  of  the  basest  manual  labour,  and 
who  nevertheless  believes  and  declares  himself  to  be  king 
of  England  or  the  Saviour  of  the  world  ?  It  will  be  said 
perhaps  that  after  all  he  has  not  lost  consciousness  of  self, 
seeing  that  he  is  conscious  he  is  a  self,  albeit  he  has  a  w^rong 
"Motion  of  the  self  which  he  is.  Certainly  he  is  likelj',  so  long 
as  his  body  keeps  its  unity  of  being,  to  be  conscious  of  being 
that  unity ;  but  it  is  plainly  nonsense  to  say  that  he  has  a 
distinct,  ever-present,  intuitive  consciousness  of  personal 
identity  when  he  cannot  identify  himself.  The  curious 
thing  is  that  this  great  personage,  after  he  has  found  his 
way  into  a  lunatic  asylum,  sometimes  settles  down  there  into 
a  quiet  and  monotonous  routine,  doing  the  humble  work  set 
him  to  do  as  if  lie  were  quite  a  common  person,  and  accept- 
ing the  attentions  of  his  lowborn  relatives  when  they  visit 


r 


304  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

him ;  not  failing,  however,  to  assert  liis  pretensions  when- 
ever reference  is  made  to  them,  and  becoming  angry  and 
excited  when  they  are  called  in  question,  ridiculed,  or  denied. 
In  practice,  so  long  as  he  thinks  not  of  himself,  he  is  his 
true  self;  in  thought,  so  soon  as  he  thinks  of  himself,  he  is 
his  untrue  self.  He  presents  a  double  or  divided  personality : 
his  true  one  representing  the  habits  of  his  automatic  being 
and  the  more  stable  functions  of  his  lower  nervous  centres, 
which  he  exhibits  in  his  capacity  of  routine-worker  doing 
mechanically  what  he  is  set  to  do ;  his  other  and  not  true 
Belf,  which  he  exhibits  when  he  reflects  on  himself  and 
asserts  his  pretensions,  representing  the  less  fixed  and  now 
deranged  functions  of  his  supreme  nerve-centres,  especially 
of  that  group  of  them  which  is  the  basis  of  his  deluded 
thought.  Thus  he  has  lost  what  was  his  last  human  gain — 
his  consciousness  of  true  moral  identity ;  he  has  retained 
consciousness  of  his  personality  as  an  eating,  drinking,  and 
labour-performing  organic  machine.  No  wonder  that  his 
conduct  exhibits  a  gross  inconsistency,  and  stirs  a  sort  of 
doubt  or  suspicion  whether  he  really  believes  himself  to  be 
the  great  person  he  claims  to  be,  wlien  his  mental  nature  is 
thus  divided  into  two  dissentient  parts  that  act  indepen- 
dently, and  cannot  be  brought  into  consentient  function. 
As  when  an  organism  has  become  the  seat  of  a  serious 
morbid  growth  Avhich  increases  at  its  expense  and  to  its 
detriment,  yet  lives  its  own  life  apart  from  it,  it  can  no 
longer  be  said  to  have  a  true  physiological  unity,  but  actually 
embodies  in  itself  two  different  and  hostile  unities  ;  so  with 
the  mind  in  which  a  morbid  delusion  has  grown  to  such  a 
height  as  to  impose  itself  upon  the  judgment,  and,  taking 
no  part  in  normal  thought,  lives  its  own  life  apart,  there  is 
no  longer  unity  but  division  of  the  personality  or  self — a 
pathological  unity  developed  within  the  natural  physiological 
one.  The  metaphysical  assertion  that  the  ego  has  not  exten- 
sion and  is  not  divisible  is  then  confronted  with  two  weighty 
objections :  first,  that  it  is  impossible  for  extended  beings  to 
form  a  mental  representation  or  even  so  much  as  a  definite 
conception  of  an  entity  of  that  nature,  and,  secondly,  that 
it  is  directly  opposed  to  plain  facts  of  observation. 


DISINTEGEATIONS   OF  THE   'EGO.'  305 

The  truth  is  that  the  manifold  varieties  of  mental 
derangement  yield  examples  of  all  degrees  of  lessening 
brightness  of  the  consciousness  of  self  down  to  its  actual 
extinction,  and  of  all  sorts  of  derangement  and  confusion  of 
it  from  the  least  unto  the  worst  distraction.  Always  the 
difficulty  in  a  particular  case  is  to  know  exactly  what  the 
defect  or  confusion  is,  since  it  is  not  possible  to  enter  into 
another  person's  mind,  to  realise  his  state  of  consciousness, 
and  in  that  way  to  measure  and  appreciate  its  exact  degree 
and  quality.  The  tendency  is  inevitable  to  misinterpret 
facts,  because  it  is  to  interpret  them  by  the  light  and 
according  to  the  standard  of  a  sound  consciousness ;  and 
that  is  a  mode  of  interpretation  which  may  be  quite  as 
wrong  as  it  would  be  to  judge  the  defective  sense  of  the 
colour-blind  person  by  the  colour-sense  of  one  who  is  sensi- 
ble to  all  the  varieties  and  intensities  of  colour.  The  latter 
finds  it  hard  to  realise  in  the  first  instance,  and  if  he  be  an 
ignorant  person  can  hardly  be  made  to  realise,  that  any  one 
has  that  defect,  because  it  is  so  contrary  to  his  own  experi- 
ence, and  his  preoccupied  mind  is  not  open  to  receive  the 
plain  evidence  of  facts.  So  it  is  with  the  sundry  and  divers 
defects  and  abnormalities  of  consciousness  met  with  in  the 
different  varieties  of  mental  derangement ;  the  railing  judge 
denounces  the  insane  criminal  whom  he  sentences  to  death, 
just  as  if  they  both  had  the  same  sane  consciousness,  and 
he,  abandoned  wretch,  had  wickedly  violated  it  for  the  selfish 
pleasure  of  doing  murder ;  and  the  introspective  psychologist 
bases  his  entire  philosophy  upon  a  method  which  assumes 
the  self-sufficingness  of  his  individual  consciousness.  Mean- 
while it  requires  a  long  and  patient  observation  of  instances, 
for  which  there  is  for  the  most  part  neither  the  opportunity, 
nor  the  inclination,  nor  the  training,  to  correct  these  errors 
of  assumption  and  to  infix  in  the  mind  just  conceptions  of 
the  variety  of  obscurations,  eclipses,  and  distractions  to  which 
consciousness  is  liable. 

How  many  patient  observations  and  experiments,  and 
how  much  steadfast  insistence,  on  the  part  of  the  physiologist 
were  required  to  prove  to  the  introspective  psychologist, 
measuring  all  human  actions  by  a  standard  of  consciousness, 


306  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

that  there  was  a  class  of  movements  which,  having  a  purpo- 
sive form  and  constituting  a  large  part  of  daily  conduct, 
were  nevertheless  strictly  automatic,  being  performed  with- 
^  out  will  and  in  some  instances  without  consciousness.  Even 
now  his  recognition  of  them  is  not  much  better  than  a  lip- 
acknowledgment,  and  he  rather  annexes  them  as  a  foreign 
appendage  to  his  philosophy,  than  assimilates  and  incorpo- 
rates them  into  its  substance.  Consider  it  well,  and  it  will 
be  seen  that  in  the  formation,  nature,  and  purpose-effecting 
work  of  a  complex  reflex  act  there  are  all  the  elements  of 
that  which  when  consciousness  goes  with  it — as  it  does  in  the 
functions  of  the  highest  nerve-centres — we  call  knowledge  : 
reception  and  reaction,  registration  of  experience,  associa- 
tion of  registered  experiences,  adaptation  of  means  to  end, 
and  definite  action  in  accordance  with  these  anterior  opera- 
tions— in  fact,  incorporate  knowledge,  reason  made  substance. 
For  what  are  these  purely  bodily  operations  at  bottom  but 
processes  which,  Avhen  they  take  place  consciously,  we 
describe  as  feeling,  retention  or  memory,  apprehension, 
judgment,  belief  and  will  ?  An  agile  person  who  is  accus- 
tomed to  cross  a  busy  street  quickly,  darting  in  and  out 
among  the  vehicles  with  which  it  is  crowded,  performs  a 
dozen  acts  of  judgment  in  as  many  seconds  on  each  occasion, 
without  being  conscious  of  them.  Let  him  deliberate  about 
the  several  decisions  which  he  makes  and  he  will  most  likely 
be  knocked  down  and  run  over.  For  the  relations  of  his 
quick  and  apt  movements  are  not  to  the  conscious  ego,  of 
which  they  are  well-nigh  independent  in  direct  aim  as  in 
function,  but  essentially  to  the  preservation  and  maintenance 
^  of  the  organic  ego.  The  mind  has  little,  if  any,  more  to  do 
'^'^  immediately  with  them  than  it  has  to  do  with  the  short 
flight  that  a  hen  makes  after  its  head  has  been  chopped 
off.  It  will  probably  be  a  long  time  yet  before  the  full 
meaning  of  this  physiological  fact  is  realised,  and  the  con- 
ception applied  to  the  bodily  operations  of  the  same  kind 
which,  because  they  are  illumined  by  consciousness,  are 
deemed  to  mark  a  new  order  of  being  and  called  mental, 
and  before,  therefore,  clear  and  exact  notions  are  obtained  of 
what  the  body  can  do  by  itself  and  of  the  part  which  con- 


DISINTEGEATIONS  OF  THE   'EGO.'  307 

sciousness  truly  has  in  mental  function.     Probably  it  -will 

be  a  still  harder  matter  to  convince  the  psychologist  of  the 

derangements  and  distractions  which  the  consciousness  of 

self  actually  undergoes  in  disease,  since  they  are  entirely 

opposed  to  his  mental  preoccupa.tions,  and  the  domain  of 
them  lies  altogether  away  from  his  observation.  Contra- 
dictory instances  that  discredit  the  very  basal  principle  of 
his  method,  it  is  more  easy  and  natural  to  pass  them  by 
without  consideration  as  morbid  and  irrelevant,  than  to  make 
an  unwelcome  study  of  them. 

It  is  a  common  event  in  one  sort  of  mental  disorder, 
especially  at  the  beginning  of  it,  for  the  person  to  complain 
that  he  is  completely  and  painfully  changed  ;  that  he  is  no 
longer  himself,  but  feels  himself  unutterably  strange ;  and 
that  things  around  him,  though  wearing  their  usual  aspect, 
yet  somehow  seem  quite  different.  I  am  so  changed  that  I 
feel  as  if  I  were  not  myself  but  another  person  ;  although  I 
know  it  is  an  illusion,  it  is  an  illusion  which  I  cannot  shake 
off;  all  things  appear  strange  to  me  and  I  cannot  properly 
apprehend  them  even  though  they  are  really  familiar ;  they 
look  a  long  way  off  and  more  like  the  figures  of  a  dream  than 
realities,  and  indeed  it  is  just  as  if  I  were  in  a  dream  and  my 
will  paralysed.  It  is  impossible  to  describe  the  feeling  of 
unreality  that  I  have  about  everything;  I  assure  myself 
over  and  over  again  that  I  am  myself,  but  still  I  cannot 
make  impressions  take  their  proper  hold  of  me,  and  come 
into  fit  relations  of  familiarity  with  my  true  self ;  between 
my  present  self  and  my  past  self  it  seems  as  if  an  eternity  of 
time  and  an  infinity  of  space  were  interposed ;  the  suffering 

that  I  endure  is  indescribable  : — such  is  the  kind  of  language 

by  which  these  persons  endeavour  to  express  the  profound 
change  in  themselves  which  they  feel  only  too  painfully  but 
cannot  describe  adequately.  An  observer  of  little  experience, 
or  one  who  has  made  little  good  use  of  his  experience, 
judging  these  complaints  by  a  self-inspective  standard,  is 
sure  to  think  that  the  distress  and  impotence  are  largely 
fanciful  or  at  any  rate  much  overstated,  and  that  they  might 
be  got  rid  of  if  the  will  could  be  stirred  to  proper  efforts ; 
not  able  to  realise  in  his  own  experience  such  an  extraor- 


308  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

dinary  mental  state,  he  cannot  enter  into  real  sympathy  with 
it  or  believe  thoroughly  in  it.  But  if  he  has  never  had  the 
delirium  of  a  fever  to  give  him  practical  experience  of  strange 
conscious  states  and  to  confound  and  alarm  him  with  the 
most  singular  distractions  of  seK,  let  him  call  to  mind  what 
has  doubtless  happened  to  himself  more  than  once  when  he 
has  been  awakened  suddenly  out  of  sleep  and  been  helplessly 
unable  for  a  few  moments  to  realise  who  he  was  or  where  he 
was  or  whether  he  was  at  all,  although  seeing  around  him 
the  usual  objects,  cognising  but  not  recognising  them, 
hearing  words  distinctly  but  apprehending  them  not;  let 
him  then  imagine  this  brief  and  passing  phase  of  conscious- 
ness to  persist,  and  to  be  his  ordinary  mental  state ;  and  he 
will  in  that  way  obtain  far  juster  notions  of  the  extraordinary 
states  of  abnormal  consciousness  than  he  will  ever  get  by 
the  sharpest  and  most  skilful  inspection  of  its  ordinary  states. 
The  interpretation  one  may  guess  to  be  something  of  this 
kind.  When  the  sleeper  wakes  in  a  sudden  start  out  of  a 
deep  sleep  or  in  the  midst  of  a  dream,  the  impressions  made 
upon  the  senses  from  without,  though  he  is  dimly  conscious 
of  them,  do  not  strike  an  accordant  chime  of  the  correspond- 
ing idea-centres,  and  therefore  no  perception  takes  place, 
the  mind  is  a  blank — the  senses  in  fact  are  awake  before 
their  perceptive  centres.  As  these,  however,  awaken  in 
instant  succession  from  their  torpor,  he  becomes  more  clearly 
conscious,  the  mind  less  blank  but  more  confused,  because 
external  impressions  begin  now  to  strike  some  partial  and 
wavering  accordances  with  the  partially  awakened  ideas  and 
their  associations ;  the  result  being  a  sort  of  half-conscious- 
ness of  self,  or  rather  a  dim  consciousness  of  a  distracted  or 
half-self.  At  last  the  whole  mental  organisation  recovers  its 
full  functions,  the  internally  organised  percepts  accord  com- 
pletely with  their  fitting  external  impressions  and  are  in  free 
relations  with  one  another,  and  he  is  himself  again  recognis- 
ing distinctly  everything  about  him.  So  it  is  with  the 
deranged  and  partially  deranged  mind.  In  consequence  per- 
haps of  some  intimate  disorder  of  the  nerve-elements  of  the 
brain,  but  at  any  rate  in  consequence  of  the  interruption  of 
the  bonds  of  association  between  the  functionally  grouped 


y\ 


DISINTEGKATIONS  OF  THE  'EGO.'  309 

centres  wliereby  they  combine  in  each  percept  and,  at  a 
higher  level  of  abstraction,  in  each  concept,  the  indivi- 
dual is  cut  off  from  his  natural  hold  of  external  realities, 
cannot  make  circuit  with  them,  so  to  speak,  and  they  there- 
fore seem  to  be  removed  to  a  greater  distance  or  wear  a 
strange  aspect  of  unfamiliarity ;  the  dull  and  dim  sensations 
that  he  has  from  them  cannot  be  brought  into  full,  close,  and 
exact  relations  with  the  past  organised  constituents  of  the 
ego.  These  his  perceptions  and  conceptions  of  the  external 
world  as  he  has  learned  by  experience  to  perceive  and  con- 
ceive it  do  not,  because  of  the  disorder  of  their  mental 
organisation,  supply  the  fitting  interpretation  of  the  signs  or 
language  of  sense  through  which  objects  appeal  to  it ;  'tis 
just  as  if  he  were  being  addressed  in  foreign  language  only 
partially  understood  by  him ;  and  accordingly  the  impressions 
made  upon  the  senses  by  his  surroundings,  not  being  tho- 
roughly recognised  and  adequately  interpreted  by  the  excita- 
tion of  their  accordant  percepts,  are  not  felt  and  known 
as  familiar,  not  truly  realised,  seem  not  in  fact  to  be  his. 

Is  it  not  as  if  the  cerebral  molecules  had  undergone  a  sort 
of^Tf-turn  or  dislocation — some  polar  displacement  perhaps 
— and  were  fixed  there,  and  so  could  come  only  into  partial 
relations  with  one  another  ?  Manifestly  were  that  to  take 
place  between  the  molecules  it  would  entail  a  corresponding 
dissociation  of  the  functionally  grouped  centres,  an  event 
which  for  that  or  some  other  reason  has  certainly  taken 
place.  The  supposition,  fanciful  as  it  is,  of  a  temporary 
polar  dislocation  of  the  molecules,  accords  at  any  rate  with 
the  singularly  sudden  and  complete  way  in  which  the  whole 
trouble  vanishes  sometimes,  the  person  who  is  at  one  mo- 
ment sunk  in  the  deepest  apathy  and  gloom  bounding  almost 
instantly  into  an  opposite  state  of  brisk  and  joyous  energy. 
With  one  bound  the  depression  vanished,'  wrote  a  lady  who 
had  been  for  two  or  three  months  in  a  profound  apathy  of 
mental  prostration.  *  It  always  goes  in  that  way.  Last  night 
I  could  have  maintained  that  some  abscess  broke  in  my  brain. 
It  was  like  the  bursting  of  a  dyke  :  no  pain,  but  something 
seemed  to  give  way.'  In  this  relation  there  are  two  simple 
observations  that  seem  fitted  to  teach  something  concerning 


310  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

tlie  mystery  of  personal  identity :  tlie  first  is,  that  a  foreign 
body — an  artificial  tooth,  for  example — which  is  in  constant 
sensory  contact  with  a  part  of  the  body  becomes  in  feeling  a 
part  of  it;  and  the  second  is,  that  a  paralysed  or  much 
numbed  part  of  the  body  becomes  in  feeling  apart  from  it, 
in  fact,  a  foreign  body.  Thus  then  an  artificial  tooth,  after 
it  has  become  a  habit  of  the  body,  is  positively  a  truer  part 
of  the  conscious  ego  than  a  paralysed  finger.  If  you  do  not 
get  the  impressions  from  without,  the  world  of  experience  in 
its  modes  as  you  have  perceived  and  thought  it  habitually, 
into  fitting  contact  with  your  organised  perceptions  and  con- 
ceptions within,  so  that  they  are  in  unison,  it  is  a  strange 
■world  to  you  or  you  are  strange  to  it — that  is  to  say, 
an  esti'anged  or  alienated  self.  Severed  from  the  surround- 
ings, physical  and  social,  to  which,  in  which,  and  through 
which  the  individual  has  grown  and  lived,  he  is  virtually  not 
himself.  There  could  be  no  intuition  of  the  ego  without  a 
complementary  or  correlative  non-ego,  no  social  individual 
being  without  a  social  medium. 

An  interesting  and  very  striking  example  of  changed 
personal  identity  is  furnished  by  a  form  of  mental  derange- 
~iiient  which,  as  it  revolves  regularly  through  two  alternating 
and  opposite  phases,  was  called  by  French  writers  circular 
insanity,  but  is  better  called  alternating  insanity.  An  attack 
of  much  mental  excitement  with  great  elation  of  thought, 
feeling,  and  conduct  is  followed  by  an  opposite  dark  phase 
of  depression,  gloom,  and  apathy,  each  state  lasting  for 
weeks  or  months,  and  the  usual  succession  of  them  recurring 
from  time  to  time  after  longer  or  shorter  intervals  of  sanity. 
Between  the  two  states  the  contrast  is  as  striking  as  could 
well  be  imagined  :  in  the  one  the  person  is  elated,  exultant, 
self-confident,  boastful  and  overflowing  with  energ}'- ;  talks 
freely  of  private  matters  which  he  would  never  have  men- 
tioned in  his  sound  state,  and  familiarly  with  those  above 
and  below  him  in  station  whom,  when  himself,  he  would  not 
have  thought  of  addressing;  in  like  manner  writes  many 
and  long  letters  full  of  details  of  opinions,  affairs,  and  plans, 
to  persons  with  whom  he  has  a  slight  acquaintance  only; 
spends  money  recklessly,  though  not  reckless  in  that  way  by 


DISINTEGRATIONS  OF  THE  'EGO.'  311 


Datnral  disposition ;  projects  bold  aud  sometimes  wild 
schemes  of  adventure ;  is  ready  and  pleased  to  harangue  in 
public  who  never  made  a  public  speech  before  ;  is  careless  of 
social  proprieties  and  even  disregards  moral  reticences  and 
restraints ;  listens  to  prudential  advice  but  heeds  it  not, 
being  inspired  with  an  extraordinary  feeling  of  well-being,  of 
intellectual  power,  of  unfettered  thought  and  will.  An 
actual  disruption  of  the  ego  there  is  not,  but  there  is  an 
extraordinary  exaltation  of  it,  in  fact  an  extreme  moral 
rather  than  an  intellectual  alienation.  The  condition  of 
things  is  much  like  that  which  goes  before  an  ordinary  out- 
break of  acute  mania,  when  there  is  great  mental  exaltation 
without  actual  incoherence,  alienation  of  character  without 
alienation  of  intelligence,  but  it  is  not,  like  it,  followed  by 
turbulent  degeneracy ;  for  when  the  excitement  passes  off 
there  supervenes  the  second  phase,  that  of  extreme  mental 
despondency  and  moral  prostration. 

How  changed  the  person  now  from  what  he  was  !    As 

self-distrustful  as  before  he  was  self-sufficient ;  as  retiring 

as  before  he  was  obtrusive ;  as  shy  and  silent  as  before  he 

was   loud    and    talkative ;    as   diffident   as   before   he   was 

boastful;    as  impotent  to  think  and  act  as  before  he  was 

eager  and  energetic  to  plan  and  to  do ;  as  entirely  oppressed 

with  a  dominating  sense  of  mental  and  bodily  incapacity  as 

before  he  was  possessed  with  an  exultant  feeling  of  exalted 

.  powers.     To  all  intents  and  purposes  he  is  a  ditferent  person, 

I    another  ego,   at  any  rate  so  far  as   consciousness  is  con-  \  / 

/     cerned — subjectively  though   not   objectively — since  in  all      \ 

^ ^relations  he  feels,  thinks,  and  acts  quite  differently.     Not 

less  marked  than  the  mental  transformation  is  the  accom- 
panying veritable  bodily  transfiguration  in  some  cases;  for 
during  the  exaltation  there  is  a  general  animation  of  the 
bodily  functions  which  makes  the  individual  look,  as  he 
feels,  years  younger.  The  skin  is  more  fresh  and  soft,  its 
wrinkles  are  smoothened,  the  eyes  bright,  eager,  and 
animated,  the  hair  less  grey  than  it  perhaps  was,  the  pulse 
more  vigorous,  the  digestion  stronger,  the  activity  increased 
tenfold,  and  one  who  had  ceased  to  be  after  the  manner  of 
women  may  become  so  again.     During  the  sequent  prostra- 


312  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

tion  the  contrast  is  so  great  that  he  would  hardly  be  known 
to  be  the  same  person  bj  one  who  knew  him  only  slightly ; 
for  every  one  of  the  foregoing  signs  of  youth  and  vigour  has 
given  place  to  as  marked  a  sign  of  age  and  want  of  vigour. 
In  the  one  state  he  is  as  if  he  had  drunk  a  draught  of  the 
elixir  of  life,  in  the  other  as  if  he  had  foretasted  the  apathy 
of  death. 

An  interesting  fact  which,  cannot  fail  to  attract  attention 
is  that  during  the  exalted  state  of  this  alternating  derange- 
ment the  person  does  with  almost  exact  automatic  repetition 
the  things  that  he  did,  and  has  the  thoughts  and  feelings 
that  he  had,  in  former  exalted  states,  and  during  the  pros- 
trate state  that  he  thinks,  feels  and  does  exactly  as  he  did 
in  former  prostrate  states.  In  the  one  state,  however,  he 
has  not  a  clear  and  exact  remembrance  of  the  events  of  the 
other ;  not  probably  that  he  forgets  them  entirely,  but  that 
he  has  only  that  sort  of  vague,  hazy  and  incomplete  remem- 
brance which  one  has  oftentimes  of  the  events  of  a  dream, 
or  that  a  drunken  man  has,  when  sober,  of  his  drunken 
feelings  and  doings.  How  indeed  could  he  remember  them 
clearly,  since  it  is  plain  he  would  be  compelled,  in  order  to 
do  so,  to  reproduce  exactly  in  himseK  the  one  state  when  he 
was  actually  in  the  other?  It  is  impossible  therefore  he 
should  realise  sincerely  the  experiences  of  the  one  during 
the  other,  though  he  may  know  as  a  matter  of  fact  that  they 
occurred  to  him,  and,  feeling  some  shame  for  what  he 
remembers,  and  misgivings  concerning  what  he  does  not 
remember,  be  unwilling  to  recall  them  and  speak  of  them. 

Nearly  related  to  these  cases,  and  probably  belonging  to 
the  same  category,  are  the  examples  of  so-called  double 
consciousness  that  have  lately  attracted  psychological  atten- 
tion ;  notably  a  case  described  by  Dr.  Azam,  of  which  great 
notice  has  been  taken,  though  there  was  no  special  novelty  in 
it.  The  mental  disorder  of  a  hysterical  woman  revolved 
through  two  quite  different  abnormal  phases  alternately : 
from  her  normal  state  when  she  was  serious,  sober,  reserved, 
industrious,  she  passed,  after  an  interval  of  sleep  and  loss  of 
consciousness,  into  an  abnormal  state,  when  she  was  gay, 
talkative,  imaginative,  turbulent  and  coquettish,  remember- 


DISINTEGRATIONS  OF  THE  'EGO.'  313 

ing  then  her  former  similar  states  and  also  her  normal  life. 
In  due  course  this  lively  condition  was  followed  by  an 
extreme  torpor  of  mind  and  body,  from  which  she  returned 
gradually  to  her  natural  self ;  and  in  this  her  normal  state 
she  is  said  to  have  entirely  forgotten  everything  that  passed 
during  the  abnormal  states,  albeit  remembering  the  events 
of  her  proper  life — that  is  to  say,  remembering  her  experi- 
'ences  when  she  was  her  true  self;  not  remembering  her 
thoughts,  feelings,  and  doings  when  she  was  not  herself, 
but  another  self.  As  she  advanced  in  years,  the  normal 
states  became  shorter  and  rarer,  the  abnormal  longer,  and 
the  transitions  from  the  one  to  the  other  almost  instanta- 
neous. These  are  the  usual  features  of  the  recurrent  mental 
exaltations  and  torpid  depressions  that  characterise  alternat- 
ing insanity  ;  and  it  is  the  common  order  of  events  in  such 
cases  for  the  lucid  intervals  to  become  shorter,  rarer .  and 
less  complete,  until  the  disease  takes  a  continuous  course 
with  periodically  changing  phases.  One  may  doubt  perhaps 
whether  all  the  events  of  her  abnormal  states  were  as  clean 
swept  from  the  memory  as  the  reporter  of  the  case  assumes, 
since  those  who  suffer  as  she  did,  having  a  dull,  painful,  and 
at  the  same  time  confused  consciousness  of  having  done  and 
said  foolish  things  during  their  states  of  excited  alienation, 
will  say  they  forget  them  rather  than  attempt  to  bring  back  to 
their  minds  what  they  would  gladly  forget  and  willingly  be 
thought  to  have  forgotten.  The  natural  self,  ashamed  of  the 
abnormal  self,  is  unwilling  as  it  is  certainly  in  great  measure 
unable  to  identify  itself  with  it,  confessing  however  by  this 
very  sense  of  shame  a  vague  consciousness  of  identity. 

It  admits  of  no  doubt  that  there  are  states  of  deranged  con- 
sciousness in  which  things  are  done  that  are  not  remem- 
bered in  the  least  when  the  person  comes  to  his  true  self, 
just  as  there  are  dreams  that  are  not  remembered :  in  the 
so-called  hypnotic  or  mesmeric  state,  for  example,  and  in 
some  remarkable  varieties  of  epilepsy,  with  which  the  pheno- 
mena of  somnambulism  in  some  respects  and  the  paroxysms 
of  recurrent  mania  in  other  respects  exhibit  suggestive 
aflB.nities.     There  is  an  epilepsy  of  consciousness,  so  to  speak, 

which  has  no  more  true  relation  to  the  normal  consciousness 
21 


314  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  "WILL. 

of  the  individual  than  the  epileptic  convulsions  to  his  natural 
movements,  or  than  the  convulsive  frenzj  of  people  in  a 
panic  when  a  crowded  theatre  takes  fire  to  their  normal 
mental  states.  Ask  one  who  has  gone  through  such  an 
excited  experience  to  describe  to  you  what  he  saw,  felt,  and 
thought  during  it,  and  you  will  learn  how  little  a  person 
may  remember  immediately  afterwards  of  that  which  he  was 
acutely  conscious  of  at  the  time.  After  a  genuine  epileptic 
seizure  certainly,  sometimes  perhaps  before  it,  sometimes 
in  its  stead,  the  individual  will  go  through  a  series  of 
acts  in  a  more  or  less  methodical  way,  as  if  he  were  con- 
scious of  what  he  was  doing ;  and  there  is  no  one  who, 
observing  him,  would  not  say  he  was ;  and  yet,  when  he 
comes  to  his  true  self,  he  shall  have  no  more  remembrance 
of  what  he  did  than  the  somnambulist  has  of  his  doings  in 
the  night.  It  is  a  hard  matter  then  for  those  who  see  him 
act  with  so  much  purpose  and  coherence,  and  consider  the 
method  shown  in  his  behaviour,  to  be  persuaded  that  he 
knew  not  what  he  did ;  but  assuredly  if  he  is  conscious  at 
the  time,  he  forgets  immediately  afterwards  (how  help  it  if 
he  cannot  produce  at  will  the  exact  recurrence  of  his 
abnormal  state  ?) ;  and  though  his  acts  may  have  evinced 
something  of  the  form  of  his  habits,  they  were  not  the  out- 
come of  his  true  self,  not  what  he  would  have  done  had  he 
been  in  possession  of  his  normal  consciousness.  To  make  the 
normal  self  responsible  for  them  would  be  just  as  if  one 
were  to  make  a  person  responsible  for  the  imagined  deeds  of 
his  dreams ;  in  which  case  everybody  would  have  to  be 
hanged.  Indeed  it  is  dream-life  that  is  best  fitted  to  give 
us  a  just  conception  of  the  nature  of  these  abnormal  states  of 
consciousness,  since  we  cannot  enter  into  them  from  the 
data  of  a  sound  consciousness,  and  of  the  partial,  confused, 
uncertain  memories,  or  of  the  complete  oblivion,  of  them 
after  they  are  gone. 

In  spite,  then,  of  aught  which  psychological  theory 
appealing  to  its  own  internal  oracle  may  urge  to  the  con- 
trary, it  is  incontestably  proved  by  observation  of  instances 
that  there  are  states  of  disordered  consciousness  which, 
being  quite  unlike  states  of  normal  consciousness,  are  not  to 


^0 


DISINTEGRATIONS  OF  THE  'EGO.'  315 

be  measured  by  them,  and  tbe  events  of  which  may  be 
remembered  only  dimly,  hazily  felt  rather  than  remembei-ed, 
or  completely  forgotten.  The  lesson  of  them  is  the  lesson 
which  has  been  enforced  over  and  over  again  on  physiolo- 
gical grounds — namely,  that  the  consciousness  of  self,  the 
unity  of  the  ego,  is  a  consequence,  not  a  cause  ;  the  expres- 
sion of  a  full  and  harmonious  function  of  the  aggregate  of 
differentiated  mind-centres,  not  a  mysterious  metaphysical 
entity  lying  behind  function  and  inspiring  and  guiding  it ; 
a  subjective  synthesis  or  unity  based  upon  the  objective 
synthesis  or  unity  of  the  organism.  As  such,  it  may  be 
obscured,  deranged,  divided,  apparently  transformed.  For 
every  breach  of  the  unity  of  the  united  centres  is  a  breach 
of  it :  subtract  any  one  centre  from  the  intimate  physio- 
logical co-operation,  the  self  is  pro  tanto  weakened  or 
mutilated ;  obstruct  or  derange  the  conducting  function  of 
the  associating  bonds  between  the  various  centres,  so  that 
they  are  dissociated  or  disunited,  the  self  loses  in  corre- 
sponding degree  its  sense  of  continuity  and  unity ;  stimulate 
one  or  two  centres  or  groups  of  centres  to  a  morbid  hyper- 
trophy so  that  they  absorb  to  them  most  of  the  mental 
nourishment  and  keep  up  a  predominant  and  almost  exclusive 
function,  the  personality  appears  to  be  transformed ;  strip 
off  a  whole  layer  of  the  highest  centres — that  highest  super- 
ordinate  organisation  of  them  that  ministers  to  abstract 
reasoning  and  moral  feeling — you  reduce  man  to  the  condi- 
tion of  one  of  the  higher  animals ;  take  away  all  the  supreme 
centres,  you  bring  him  to  the  state  of  a  simply  sentient 
creature  ;  remove  the  centres  of  sense,  you  reduce  him  to  a 
bare  vegetative  existence  when,  like  a  cabbage,  he  has  an 
objective  but  no  subjective  ego.  These  are  the  conclusions 
which  we  are  compelled  to  form  when,  not  blinking  facts, 
we  observe  nature  sincerely  and  interpret  it  faithfully, 
going  to  plain  experience  for  facts  to  inform  our  under- 
standings, instead  of  invoking  our  own  imaginations  to  utter 
oracles  to  us. 

I  have  said  enough  to  show  that  moral  feeling,  will,  and 
consciousness  of  self  are  no  less  liable  to  suffer  from  the 
accidents  of  bodily  structure  than  the  mental  functions  of  a 


316  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

lower  grade ;  that  the  highest  have  no  immunity  or  privilege 
over  the  lowest  in  that  respect ;  that  when  disease  invades 
the  physical  substrata  of  mental  organisation  they  are  the 
first  to  attest  its  deranging  effects.  Nothing  would  be 
gained  by  going  into  fuller  pathological  details,  for  the 
difficulty  is  not  to  multiply  instances,  as  might  easily  be 
done,  but  to  get  plain  instances  attended  to  and  the  lessons 
of  them  taken  to  heart.'  The  teachings  of  mental  pathology 
are  at  one  with  the  teachings  of  mental  physiology,  and 
indeed  with  some  of  the  teachings  of  a  rightly  interpreted 
introspection,  in  pointing  to  the  same  plain  conclusion — 
namely,  that  mind  does  not  mean  a  new  order  of  things  in 
the  sense  of  a  new,  entirely  special  and  unrelated  order  of 
being,  not  subject  to  the  laws  which  reign  in  nature,  but 
inspired  from  God  in  the  first  instance  and  not  anywise  to 
be  known  afterwards  except  through  the  same  inspiration ; 
that  in  the  study  of  sound  mental  function  we  have  to  do 
with  a  natural  evolution  from  the  basis  of  all  that  has  gone 
before  in  the  order  of  existence,  with  that  indeed  which  is 
the  latest  and  highest  outcome  of  the  long  travail  of  matter, 
and  in  the  study  of  mental  pathology  with  a  dissolution  or 
unbecoming;  and  that  the  fruitful  method  to  be  pursued 
is  the  positive  method  of  observation  and  induction,  which 
has  been  successfully  employed  in  the  other  sciences.  That 
is  the  true  way,  and  their  gains  are  the  solid  steps,  by  which 
we  can  ascend  and  enter  into  the  chamber  of  mind. 

'  I  may  refer  here  to  a  small  volume  entitled  Les  Maladiet  de  la  Volonte, 
by  Monsieur  Th.  Ribot,  the  well-known  editor  of  the  Revue  Philosophique.  I 
regret  that  the  book  reached  me  after  this  work  was  in  type. 


SECTION  vn. 

WHAT   WILL   BE    THE    END   THEREOF? 

Are  we  to  look  forward  to  a  continued  becoming  or  to  an 
ultimate  unbecoming  of  things  ?  Will  evolution  on  earth  go 
on  for  ever  ?  Or  is  not  the  end  of  life  on  earth  foredoomed 
by  as  certain  a  fate  as  the  end  of  individual  life  ?  Will  not 
the  same  causes  that  have  formed  it,  and  are  bringing  it  to 
perfection,  even  should  they  continue  to  operate,  inevitably 
bring  it  to  destruction  ?  To  us,  who  are  alive,  it  may  seem 
incredible  that  death  can  be  the  adequate  end  of  such  a  long 
succession  and  such  a  vast  complexity  of  life ;  but  it  is 
incredible  only  because  we  are  alive  and  conceive  things 
according  to  our  own  measure  ;  it  will  be  more  credible  to 
each  of  us  when  he  is  nearly  dead,  and  not  incredible  at  all 
when  he  is  dead.  Without  doubt  there  will  be  further  great 
gains  of  evolution  yet  in  the  long  long  while  the  world  may 
last,  but  all  the  signs  point  plainly  to  the  conclusion  that 
its  range  on  earth  is  limited,  its  end  forefixed  in  its  past, 
foretokened  in  the  present,  foredoomed  in  the  future.  It 
may  be  the  time  will  come  after  many  ages,  as  good  men 
hoping  believe,  when  mankind,  dwelling  together  in  peace 
and  unity,  shall  not  learn  war  any  more,  and  righteousness 
shall  reign  upon  earth,  or  when,  as  philosophic  idealists 
dream,  a  higher  race  of  beings  sprung  by  evolutional  ascent 
from  man  and  realising  his  loftiest  ideals  shall  supplant 
him ;  but  even  if  these  visions  of  devout  imagination  become 
facts  they  will  only  be  the  steps  of  a  progress  that  lead 
progress  so  much  nearer  to  its  grave.  Nay,  it  may  well  be 
that  man  is  destined  to  perish  off  the  face  of  the  earth 
before  he  has  attained  to  the  wisdom  and  goodness  that  he 
aspires  to;  that  he  is  doomed,  Moses-like,  only  to  see  from 
a  distance,  but  never  to  enter,  the  promised  land  of  his  hopes. 
The  universe  makes  no  sign  of  feeling  itself  under  the  least 
obligation  to  make  him  realise  his  ideal,  and  the  predomi- 
nance of  the  ideal  itself  in  the  world  must  be  deemed 
precarious  so  long  as  an  evil  power  or  anti-idealistic  process 


318  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

exists  ill  it,  since  the  latter  may  always  hope  to  win  in  the 
end.  Alongside  a  process  of  evolution  there  has  always  been 
in  operation  a  process  of  degeneracy,  and  the  simple  ques- 
tion is  whether  this  process  will  not  eventually  gain  the 
upper  hand,  and  then  increasing  in  a  geometrical  ratio  undo 
rapidly  all  that  has  been  done  slowly  through  the  ages. 

For  what  is  the  actual  basis,  the  fundamental  condition, 
of  all  the  progress  from  simple  to  complex  combinations  of 
matter,  from  dead  to  living  matter,  from  low  to  high 
organisms,  from  simple  sensation  and  movement  to  moral 
feeling  and  will?  If  the  answer  be  made  that  it  is  God  that 
giveth  the  increase,  the  answer  must  be  received  in  silence, 
provided  only  that  is  not  the  particular  God  of  any  particu- 
lar people  that  is  meant :  not  the  God  of  India,  nor  of  Egypt, 
nor  of  Greece,  nor  of  Eome,  nor  of  Abraham,  nor  of  Mahomet, 
nor  even  the  God,  older  than  these  Gods,  that  was  worshipped 
by  the  ancestors  of  the  whole  Aryan  race  under  the  names 
of  Light  and  Sky — Dydus-pitar  or  Heaven-Father,  who 
became  afterwards  the  Zevs  irarr^p,  or  Jupiter.  Without 
vainly  attempting  the  impossible  feat  of  going  beyond  our 
relations  back  to  a  First  Cause  which  must  necessarily  be 
incomprehensible,  and  even  so  much  as  to  name  is  to  defame, 
we  see  plainly  that  the  essential  condition  of  all  the  succes- 
sive becomings  of  things  on  earth  (the  (^vais  of  the  Greek 
philosophers  which,  meaning  literally  a  becoming,  we  trans- 
late and  personify  as  Nature,  and  bid  fair  soon  to  personify 
as  Evolution)  is  the  light  and  heat  of  the  sun.  This  is  the 
force — represented  of  old  as  Father-Heaven  generating  upon 
Mother-Earth — which,  acting  upon  matter  through  countless 
ages,  has  inspired  it  to  go  through  its  evolutional  changes  : 
the  sun,  *  of  this  great  world  both  eye  and  soul,'  praised  by 
herbs  and  trees  and  flowers  in  the  joy  of  their  vernal  beauty, 
by  birds  in  their  thrilling  melodies  of  song,  by  poets  in  their 
rhapsodies  of  love.  Praise  him,  ye  hosts  of  planets,  poised 
in  your  orbits  by  him ;  praise  him,  ye  mists  and  exhalations ; 
praise  him,  ye  winds,  and  wave  your  tops,  ye  pines  j  join 
voices,  all  ye  living  souls  ;  ye  birds,  bear  in  your  wings  and 
in  your  notes  his  praise  ;  ye  that  in  waters  glide,  and  ye  that 
walk  the  earth,  praise  him. 


WHAT  WILL  BE  THE  END  THEEEOF  ?  319 

Hail,  universal  Lord,  be  bounteous  still 
To  give  us  only  good  ;  and  if  the  night 
Have  gathered  aught  of  evil,  or  concealed, 
Disperse  it,  as  now  light  dispels  the  dark  ! ' 

Such  the  language  of  adoration  and  praise  which  Milton 
represents  our  first  parents  as  addressing  to  the  Lord  of 
light  and  life,  the  power  which  has  infused  their  energies 
into  all  these  things,  whose  might  they  continually  declare 
and  whose  praises  they  continually  show  forth.  When  we  con- 
sider that  the  sun  is  the  immediate  source  of  these  energies, 
is  it  any  wonder  that  Sun-worship  was  the  religion  of  man 
at  an  early  stage  of  his  development  ?  Nor  can  it  be  any 
wonder  that  when  he  came  to  perceive  that  the  sun  with  its 
system  of  attendant  planets,  which  at  one  time  seemed  the 
universe  to  him,  was  but  a  little  thing  in  a  galaxy  of  suns 
and  stars,  no  more  than  an  atom-cluster  in  an  innumerable 
multitude  of  similar  atom-clusters  extending  through  un- 
fathomable space,  he  rose  to  a  wider  and  higher  and  more 
abstract  conception  of  the  Power  in  Heaven  which  fixed  the 
stars  in  their  places  and  holds  the  planets  in  their  orbits, 
which  appointed  the  sun  to  rule  the  day  and  the  moon  to  rule 
the  night  on  earth,  and  in  which  all  things  there  live  and  move 
and  have  their  being.  But  however  high  and  far  in  its  widen- 
ing conception  of  the  universe  human  thought  may  relegate 
God  to  the  tenuity  of  the  abstract,  it  remains  certain  that 
for  us  practically  and  for  our  earth  the  sun  is  all  in  all,  and 
that  when  its  light  and  heat  expire  all  those  energies  on 
earth  which  it  animates  will  expire  also. 

The  common  law  of  life  is  slow  acquisition,  equilibrium 
for  a  time,  then  a  gentle  decline  that  soon  becomes  a  rapid 
decay,  and  finally  death.  It  is  a  law  which  governs  the 
growth,  decline,  and  fall  of  nations  as  well  as  of  individuals, 
for  a  nation,  being  a  complex  union  of  very  complexly  con- 
stituted individuals,  cannot  any  more  than  they  continue  for 
ever  in  one  stay.  Nor  can  humanity  as  a  whole  escape  the 
doom  thus  plainly  decreed  for  it.  If  the  force  at  the  back  of 
all  becoming  on  earth  is  that  which  the  sun  has  steadily 

»  Paradise  Lost,  Book  V.,  pp.  180-200. 


320  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

supplied  to  it  througli  countless  ages,  and  still  steadily 
supplies,  it  is  plain  that  wlien  it  fails,  as  fail  it  one  day 
must,  there  will  be  a  steadily  declining  development  and  a 
rapidly  increasing  degeneration  of  things,  an  undoing  by 
regressive  decompositions  of  what  has  been  done  by  pro- 
gressive combinations  through  the  succession  of  the  ages. 
The  disintegrating  process  may  be  expected  to  take  effect 
first  in  the  highest  products  of  evolution  and  to  reach  in 
deepening  succession  the  low,  lower,  and  lowest  organisa- 
tions and  organic  compounds.  The  nations  that  have  risen 
high  in  complexity  of  development  will  degenerate  and  be 
broken  up,  to  have  their  places  taken  by  less  complex  associa- 
tions of  inferior  individuals ;  they  in  turn  will  yield  place  to 
simpler  and  feebler  unions  of  still  more  degraded  beings ; 
species  after  species  of  animals  and  plants  will  first  degenerate 
and  then  become  extinct,  as  the  worsening  conditions  of  life 
render  it  impossible  for  them  to  continue  the  struggle  for 
existence ;  a  few  scattered  families  of  degraded  human 
beings  living  perhaps  in  snowhuts  near  the  equator,  very 
much  as  Esquimaux  live  now  near  the  pole,  will  represent 
the  last  wave  of  the  receding  tide  of  human  existence  before 
its  final  extinction ;  until  at  last  a  frozen  earth  incapable  of 
cultivation  is  left  without  energy  to  produce  a  living  particle 
of  any  sort  and  so  death  itself  is  dead.* 

The  inevitable  end  of  all  that  is  done  under  the  sun  when 
the  sun  itself  is  extinguished  is  a  world  undone — a  world, 
that  is,  become  inorganic  in  the  reverse  way  of  that  by 
which  it  became  organic.  We  have  only  to  reflect  how  hard 
and  mean,  torpid  and  incomplete,  human  life  is  now  in  those 
frozen  regions  of  the  north  where  its  bare  continuance  is 
precarious,  and  how  paralysing  are  the  effects  upon  human 
activity  of  an  exceptionally  severe  winter  in  those  temperate 
parts  where  it  is  usually  in  full  vigour,  to  perceive  that  no 
great  or  prolonged  cold  will  be  needed  to  wither  all  the 
finer  feelings  and  the  loftier  aspirations  of  mankind,  and  to 

'  All  this,  if  the  world  perishes  by  the  processes  of  what  may  be  called 
natural  decay.  But  there  are  equal  chances,  according  to  the  aslronomers, 
that  it  will  come  to  a  premature  and  violent  end,  the  elements  being  melted 
with  fervent  heat  owing  to  the  fall  of  a  comet  into  the  sun. 


WHAT  WILL  BE  THE  END  THEEEOF?  321 

bring  to  an  end  all  the  higher  forms  of  its  energy.  Nor  is 
it  without  interest  to  note  how  ancient  and  widespread  has 
been  the  notion  that  the  world  would  relapse  into  chaos 
again.  Lucretius  was  content  to  believe  it  on  grounds  of 
reason  without  desiring  to  witness  it — 

Quod  procul  a  nobis  flectat  fortana  gubernans  : 
Et  ratio  potius  quam.  res  persuadeat  ipsa. 

Once  the  dissolution  of  things  has  got  full  start  and  way, 
it  will  be  vastly  quicker  than  the  evolution  has  been ;  for 
the  degenerate  products  of  social  disintegration  will  not 
fail,  like  morbid  elements  in  the  physiological  organism  or 
like  the  poisonous  products  of  its  own  putrefaction,  to  act 
as  powerful  disintegrants,  and  to  hasten  by  their  anti-social 
energies  the  downward  course.  Not  that  humanity  will 
reti'ograde  quickly  through  the  exact  stages  of  its  former 
slow  and  tedious  progress,  as  every  child  now  goes  quickly 
forwards  through  them :  it  will  not  in  fact  reproduce  savao-es 
with  the  simple  mental  qualities  of  children,  but  new  and 
degenerate  varieties  with  special  repulsive  characters — 
savages  of  a  decomposing  civilisation,  as  we  might  call 
them — who  will  be  ten  times  more  vicious  and  noxious,  and 
infinitely  less  capable  of  improvement,  than  the  savages  of  a 
primitive  barbarism  ;  social  disintegrants  of  the  worst  kind, 
because  bred  of  the  corruption  of  the  best  organic  develop- 
ments, with  natures  and  properties  virulently  anti-social. 
We  may  note  now  that  degenerate  nations  which  have  fallen 
far  from  their  once  high  estate  do  not  recover  it,  and  that 
they  are  really  more  difficult  to  lift  into  the  path  of  progress 
than  barbarous  nations  that  have  never  known  a  higher 
state :  they  have  exhausted  the  self-conservative  impulse  of 
evolution  and  are  a  fit  soil  to  breed  and  nurse  the  retrograde 
products  of  disintegration.  In  the  progressive  communities 
of  to-day  we  have  only  to  do  with  such  products  as  occasional 
intruders — sporadic  occurrences  that  are  foreign  to  the  social 
constitution,  which,  inspired  with  strong  vital  energy,  is  able 
to  thwart  and  to  eliminate  them  j  but  when  it  has  entered 
upon  the  path  of  its  decline  they  will  predominate  and  meet 
with  no  counteracting  resistance  in  the  healthy  vigour  of  a 


^^,        — 1^ 


322  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

growing  social  organism.  So  then  we  may  read  the  lesson 
thus :  as  the  products  of  organic  decomposition  are  fatal  to 
the  organism,  if  not  eliminated  or  counteracted,  and  the 
most  virulent  and  fatal  those  that  are  derived  from  the  cor- 
ruption of  its  own  substance,  so  the  products  of  social 
disintegration  will  be  fatal  to  social  integration,  when  they 
are  not  eliminated  or  counteracted,  and  the  most  virulent 
disintegrants  of  a  nation  or  society  those  that  are  the  pro- 
ducts of  its  own  social  corruption. 

If  we  are  minded  to  guess  what  will  be  the  effect  of  the 
waning  of  the  evolutional  or  generative  force  in  nature 
upon  the  feelings  and  aspirations  and  energies  of  mankind, 
consider  the  effects  that  follow  the  waning  of  it  in  the 
individual.  Contrast  the  different  mental  characters  of 
puberty,  of  manhood,  of  old  age :  the  overflowing  energy 
of  the  first,  its  raptures  of  love,  its  generous  enthu- 
siasms and  fervent  hopes,  its  expansive  friendships,  its 
bright  and  lofty  ideals,  its  ambitions  to  do  great  things, 
its  eager  desire  of  fame — all  attesting  an  exuberance  of 
evolutional  energy ;  next  the  more  sober  ideals  of  ripe  man- 
hood, when  the  vital  energy  has  attained  and  maintains  an 
equilibrium  with  its  environment — activity  of  more  measured 
kind,  sedater  judgment,  a  great  cooling  of  enthusiasms  and 
inflamed  hopes,  calculated  amities,  colder  and  clearer  reason, 
and  therewith  a  considerable  disillusioning  whereby  the 
estimate  of  the  value  of  immediate  fame  sinks  much  and 
gives  place  rather  to  the  ambition  of  a  larger  and  more  last- 
ing fame  in  the  mouths  of  a  wiser  posterity;  lastly,  the 
mental  effects  of  age,  as  it  quenches  gradually  the  ag- 
gressive energies  of  life,  disturbing  the  equilibrium  in 
favour  of  the  environment,  and  leaves  the  self-conserving 
energies  more  than  they  can  do  to  hold  their  own.  Amon^ 
these  effects  are  the  extinction  of  the  ideal  in  a  contracted 
egoism ;  an  almost  entire  absorption  in  the  present  and  its 
pursuits,  or  at  any  rate  a  very  small  regard  to  the  future, 
especially  to  that  great  future  which  is  so  near  at  hand ;  a 
life  in  sensations  and  habits ;  obtuse  or  cynical  indifference 
to  the  opinion  of  cotemporaries  or  of  posterity,  if  the  natural 
vanity  of  a  vain  character  has  not  grown  to  excess  in  the 


WHAT  WILL  BE  THE  END  THEREOF?  323 

decaying  soil  of  senility ;  oftentimes  an  intensely  persistent 
grasp  of  what  was  possessed  and  an  obstinate  desire  to  be 
what  he  has  been,  attesting  the  self-conservative  struggle  of 
failing  vitality  to  hold  that  which  threatens  to  slip  from  it; 
decay  of  all  enthusiasms  and  of  the  finer  moral  sensibilities  ; 
incapacity  to  feel  real  sympathy  with  the  joys  and  sorrows 
of  others,  or  indeed  to  feel  deeply  any  sorrow  ;  overmuch  de- 
liberation in  endless  repetitions  without  executive  energy  to 
resolve  and  to  accomplish ;  no  expansive  desire  or  hope  to 
;  propagate  an  esteemed  name  amongst  living  kind  or  through 
1/  the  ages,  the  desire,  if  any,  being  a  joyless  habit,  like  the 
!L  possibly  still  feebly  surviving  reproductive  function.  It  is  a 
pregnant  lesson  and  a  grim  forewarning  :  a  lesson  that  the 
extinction  of  the  reproductive  energy  of  the  individual  is  the 
extinction  not  of  his  desire  only  to  propagate  his  bodily  kind, 
but  of  his  desire  to  propagate  himself  mentally  through  the 
ages ;  a  forewarning  that  what  is  taking  place  day  by  day  in 
individual  life  will  one  last  long  day  take  place  in  the  life  of 
the  race.  Is  it  any  wonder  then  that  the  generative  force  in 
nature,  under  one  guise  or  another,  has  been  the  object  of 
worship  in  so  many  religions,  when  worship  is  itself  an  out- 
come and  incident  of  it  ? 

What  an  awful  contemplation,  that  of  the  human  race 
bereft  of  its  evolutional  energy,  disillusioned,  without 
enthusiasm,  without  hope,  without  aspiration,  without  an 
ideal !  To  it  now  such  an  issue  may  well  appear  incredible, 
since  youth  and  energy  cannot  believe  sincerely,  can  only 
think  it  believes,  in  decay  and  death.  Perhaps  it  will  be 
declared  repugnant  to  reason  to  suppose  that  mankind  could 
cherish  ideals,  and  thus  far  ever  rising  ideals,  were  these 
not  destined  some  time  to  have  full  realisation  somewhere ; 
and  much  more  so  to  believe  that,  having  reached  its  zenith, 
these  will  give  place  to  ever  worsening  ideals  of  ever  worsen- 
ing states  of  things,  as  the  foregoing  theory  of  human 
extinction  assumes  will  happen.  But  the  instinctive  repug- 
nance ought  not  to  count  as  a  fact  of  much  weight :  in  the  first 
place,  it  is  no  argument  against  death  that  life  in  full  energy 
has  a  repugnance  to  it  and  cannot  realise  it ;  in  the  second 
place,  the  extinction  of  evolutional  energy  that  must  follow 


324  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

the  gradual  extinction  of  solar  energy  will  involve  in  its  con- 
sequences the  extinction  of  tlie  upward-tending  ideal,  and 
mankind  will  go  on  contentedly  with  a  downward-tending 
ideal,  or  anti-ideal,  without  feeling  it  to  be  such,  just  as  declin- 
ing nations  do  now,  any  forlorn  Cassandra  that  may  raise  a 
warning  cry  meeting  her  eternal  fate  of  being  unheeded ; 
and  in  the  third  place,  if  there  be  an  intuitive  truth  in  the 
hope  and  conviction  of  a  future  realisation  of  lofty  ideals,  it 
does  not  follow  that  the  realisation  will  take  place  on  earth. 
It  is  perchance  a  cosmic  instinct  of  the  matter  of  which  we 
are  constituted.    In  the  countless  millions  of  space-pervading 
orbs  it  may  have  been  and  may  be  again  the  functions  of 
many  to  take  up  the  tale  of  organic  evolution  and  to  carry 
the  process  to  higher  and  higher  levels,  even  to  organisations 
that  are  utterly  inconceivable  to  us,  constituted  as  we  are. 
For  us  men  and  for  our  salvation  the  earth  and  its  sun  are 
all  in  all,  but  in  the  universe  and  its  evolution  new  heavens 
and  new  earths  may  be  natural  incidents,  and  the  whole  solar 
system  to  which  the  earth  belongs  of  no  greater  moment  than 
the  life  of  the  meanest  insect  is  in  the  history  of  that  system,  of 
no  greater  proportion  than  a  moment  in  its  duration.     How 
grotesquely  ludicrous  then  the  absurdity  of  man's  vainly  at- 
tempted  conceptions  of  a  great  final  cause  or  purpose  of 
things  !   In  order  to  conceive  a  cosmic  final  cause  it  would  be 
necessary  for  tLe  individual  to  achieve  the  abolition  of  time, 
which  is  the  mere  condition  of  human  thought,  and  to  acquire 
the  power  of  thinking  beyond  himself,  which  would  be  the 
abolition  of  himself.    Let  an  insect,  born  in  the  morning  and 
dying  of  old  age  in  the  following  midnight,  be  supposed  to 
think  as  we  think,  it  might  well  believe  it  impossible  that 
the  glorious  pageant  of  the  rising  sun,  with  the  accompany- 
ing awakening   of   animal   and   vegetable  life,  its  waxing 
brightness  into  the   full   splendour  of   noontide,   and    its 
gradual  waning   through   evening   twilight  into    darkness, 
could  be  the  worthy  end  and  purpose  of  such  great  events. 
Although  it  would  be  the  absolute  end  for  it,  and  could  not 
by  it  be  thought  otherwise,  it  would  not  be  the  end,  since 
after  the  darkness  another  day  would  dawn  and  countless 
other  days  after  that,  as  countless  days  had  dawned  before. 


I 


WHAT  WILL  BE  THE  END  THEKEOF?  325 

So  may  it  well  be  witli  the  universe  as  revealed  through 
human  relations.  Before  our  world  was  an  innumerable 
multitude  of  worlds  were,  and  after  it  has  been  an  innumer- 
able multitude  of  worlds  will  be.  Even  though  righteous- 
ness never  reign  on  earth,  and  the  belief  of  that  blessed 
consummation  be  an  illusion  with  which  man  dupes  himself 
into  faith  and  self-sacrifice,  righteousness  may  still  have 
reigned,  may  even  now  reign,  and  may  reign  hereafter  in  the 
universe.  Those  who  believe  in  the  fall  of  man  from  a  high 
state  of  happiness  and  perfection  which  he  once  enjoyed  on 
earth,  the  dim  memory  of  which  remains  in  him  as  an  ideal 
to  aspire  to  and  to  regain,  so  accounting  to  themselves  for 
the  otherwise  inexplicable  existence  of  the  ideal  in  him, 
ought  to  transfer  the  scene  and  date  of  Paradise  to  another 
planet  of  another  solar  system  countless  ages  ago.  Let  them 
then  discover  in  the  matter  of  this  earth  a  kind  of  dimly 
instinctive  intimation  or  memory  of  its  experiences  from  all 
eternity,  and  amongst  them  of  the  experience  that  it  once 
had  of  that  better  life  in  the  defunct  planet  or  planets  of 
which  it  formed  part. 

If  the  evolutional  nisus  in  nature,  and  in  man  as  a  part 
of  it,  inspires  idealism,  its  failure  must  be  the  avatar  of 
pessimism.  The  highest  becoming  of  things,  the  highest 
expression  of  which  is  in  the  best  human  feeling,  imagination 
and  will,  then  will  come  to  an  end,  and  in  its  stead  will  pre- 
vail a  lower  becoming  of  things,  first  manifest  in  the  highest 
human  feeling,  imagination  and  will.  No  throb-  more  will 
be  felt  of  that  mysterious  inspiration  which  has  been  thought 
supernatural,  and  which,  whatever  its  source,  has  created 
ideals  and  inflamed  aspirations,  has  infused  a  sacred  and 
authoritative  sanction  into  morality,  and  has  taken  form  in 
80  many  inadequate  human  representations ;  and  in  place  of 
these  dethroned  divinities  there  will  be  no  aspiration,  no 
holy  sense  of  duty,  no  belief,  only  dreary  apathy  or  torpid 
resignation.  Pessimism  declaring  the  extinction  of  illusions 
will  then  actually,  as  sometimes  now  theoretically,  make  for 
itself  an  ideal  of  despair  and  be  content  with  its  gloomy  con- 
ceit. Be  that  so  or  not,  however,  it  may  justly  be  doubted 
whether  it  is  anything  more  than  illusive  imagination  that 


326  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

foresees,  as  crown  of  organic  evolution,  a  race  of  placid  beings 
bound  together  in  unity  of  spirit,  making  the  whole  earth  busy 
with  their  peaceful  industries,  persuaded  rationally  of  the  folly 
of  war,  and  living  lives  of  good-will  and  good  works  to  one 
another ;  whether  in  fact  such  a  consummation  would  not 
mean  the  emasculation,  physical,  moral,  and  intellectual,  of 
the  race. 

Is  it  so  certain  as  it  is  assumed  to  be,  that  a  higher  moral 
evolution,  should  it  take  place,  will  tend  necessarily  to  the 
greater  happiness  of  mankind  ?  More  refined  and  delicate 
sentiments  may  render  an  individual  too  sensitive  morally, 
and  therefore  painfully  vulnerable  in  a  world  the  march  of 
which  is  marked  by  no  little  brutal  force.  He  may  become 
hyper-sensitive  morally  as  well  as  physically.  A  certain  rude 
and  blunt  vigour  of  fibre  is  a  necessary  endowment  of  the 
man  who  is  framed  in  mind  and  body  to  succeed  well  in 
practical  life.  The  survival  of  the  J&ttest  is  not  commonly 
the  survival  of  the  finest  nature.  It  would  be  plain  ruin  for 
any  one  to  attempt  to  realise  a  lofty  ideal  in  his  daily  busi- 
ness where  he  is  brought  into  competition  with  others  who 
act  on  a  8)  stem  of  reticence,  dissimulation,  and  overreaching. 
Do  not  crushed  sensibilities,  disillusionment  and  despair 
cause  many  more  suicides  than  cancer  and  other  painful  and 
hopeless  diseases  ?  Certainly  it  is  not  idiots  and  animals 
that  commit  suicide.  In  order  that  morality  may  succeed 
in  the  world  it  will  be  necessary  for  the  immoral  to  make  a 
beginning. 

If  a  disillusioned  and  degenerative  end  of  mankind  on  earth 
has  been  forefixed  from  the  beginning,  it  would  seem  that  we 
ought  to  observe  here  and  there,  and  from  time  to  time  in 
its  histor}',  forewarning  indications  of  that  consummation, 
more  especially  now  when  it  has  plainly  reached  a  high  stage 
of  self- reflection.  May  it  not  be  that  we  are  in  daily  presence 
of  such  foretokens  without  thinking  enough  of  their  meaning  ? 
Are  there  not  faintly  heard  from  time  to  time,  afar  ofP,  the 
solemn  tolls  of  destiny  which,  though  hearing  them,  we  un- 
derstand not?  Metaphysical  disquisitions  concerning  the 
reality  of  an  external  world ;  scepticism  as  to  the  very  founda- 
tions of  knowledge,  and  doubts  whether  all  that  we  see  and 


WHAT  WILL  BE  THE  END  THEREOF?  327 

seem  is  not  piTre  illusion — a  dream  within  a  dream  ;  elaborate 
introspective  self-analyses  ;  thin  and  shrieking  sentimentali- 
Jbies  ;  emasculated  sensualities  in  art  masquerading  as  art  for 
art's  sake ;  the  increase  of  sorrow  that  increase  of  knowledge 
is  ;  the  conviction  of  the  utter  vanities  of  all  things  under  the 
sun,  which  has  been  the  experience  of  the  greatest  sages  and 
is  the  central  truth  at  the  heart  of  all  religions  ;  the  multi- 
plication of  suicides  from  life-weariness  or  from  impotence 
to  face  life's  struggles : — all  these  and  the  like  maladies  of 
self-consciousness,  notably  absent  in  the  animal  and  un- 
civilised man,  where  generative  energy  is  in  full  vigour  and 
has  not  become  self-conscious,  what  are  they  but  proofs 
that  the  highest  achievements  of  thought  sever  the  unity  of 
man  and  nature  and  bring  doubt  and  disillusion  ?  It  is  not 
man  who,  as  a  being  separate  from  nature,  prophesies  thus 
of  it,  but  nature  that  testifies  of  itself  in  him.  They  are 
its  forewarning  intimations  of  inevitable  decline  and  death  ; 
the  proof  that  nature  itself  is  reaching  a  stage  of  develop- 
ment at  which  disillusioning  begins. 

The  oiganised  system  of  belief  in  the  ideal  and  of  the 
pretence  of  belief  that  it  is  being  realised  will  no  doubt  con- 
tinue for  a  time  after  genuine  belief  has  expired.  But  not 
for  ever ;  when  there  is  no  longer  the  aspiration  to  realise 
the  ideal,  the  inclination  to  idealise  the  real  will  fail  also. 
The  elaborately  organised  pretences  of  virtue  through  the 
systematic  concealments  of  vice  will  not  be  kept  up,  and  life 
will  be  viewed  in  its  bare  misery  and  vanity.  Men  will  feel 
the  wish  in  life,  as  they  now  give  thanks  at  death,  to  be 
delivered  from  the  burden  of  the  flesh  and  from  the  miseries 
of  this  sinful  world.  Those  are  the  fervent  thanks  that  they 
solemnly  give  to  Almighty  God  when  death  has  removed  one 
of  them  from  a  life  which  at  the  same  time  they  eagerly 
pretend  to  consider  a  blessing.  Solomon,  the  wisest  and 
wealthiest  man  that  ever  lived,  who  exhausted  the  poten- 
tialities of  enjoyment,  and  Job,  the  most  afflicted  and  most 
patient  of  men,  who  exhausted  the  potentialities  of  suffering, 
came  to  much  the  same  conclusion  with  regard  to  the  vexa- 
tion, vanity,  and  littleness  of  human  life.  To  the  same 
conclusion,  explicit  or  implicit,  must  the  human  race  come 


328  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

too  in  the  end.  And  a  sad  and  sadly  significant  thing  it 
will  be  when  the  entertainment  and  adoration  of  the  ideal 
are  extinguished  in  the  mind. 

To  point  out  in  a  clear  exposition  that  each  of  the  tokens 
I  have  mentioned  has  the  meaning  which  I  have  ascribed  to 
it  would  carry  me  far  beyond  the  proper  scope  of  this  essay. 
From  among  other  instances  of  distempered  self-conscious- 
ness that  might  be  meditated  upon,  consider  for  a  moment 
the  frequent  degeneration  of  sound  sentiment  into  shrieking 
sentimentality.  Instead  of  deep,  calm,  restrained,  and 
massive  feeling,  fusing  intelligence  and  activity  into  whole 
and  wholesome  unity,  than  which  nothing  can  be  more 
excellent  and  beautiful,  there  is  everywhere  the  shrill  outcry 
of  thin  sentimentalities,  which  are  the  outcome  of  exagge- 
rated egoisms — a  true  egoistic  hypersesthesia — and  actually 
disintegrant  in  their  effects.  Do  you  require  a  particular 
instance  of  repulsive  sentimentalisms  that  are  no  better  than 
a  shameless  and  indecent  exposure  of  feelings  ?  Take  one 
which  the  awe  of  its  subject  cannot  help  lending  a  certain 
dignity  to — the  howling  displays  of  self-consciousness  that 
are  shown  nowadays  with  respect  to  the  event  and  the  circum- 
stances of  death,  notwithstanding  that  to  die  is  as  natural 
and  common  as  to  be  born.  Nobody  of  the  least  note  dies 
but  we  are  told  with  clamour  of  grief  and  convulsive  sobs 
which  might  be  thought  to  express  the  deepest  distress — 
though  they  really  are  the  luxury  of  incontinent  feeling — that 
the  most  amiable,  the  most  accomplished,  the  most  witty, 
the  most  wise,  the  best  of  men  has  been  taken  from  us,  and 
that  the  loss  is  an  irreparable  calamity  to  mankind.  And 
this  though  he  may  have  been  eighty  years  old  and  almost 
in  his  dotage  !  As  if  anybody  ever  dies  of  whom  it  can  be 
truly  said  that  it  is  of  the  least  consequence  to  mankind  in 
the  long  run  when  he  dies ;  or  as  if  his  resurrection  a  few 
months  after  his  death  would  not  be  a  most  embarrassing 
and  unwelcome  event.  Contrast  this  modern  incontinence 
of  emotion  with  the  calm,  chaste,  and  manly  simplicity  of 
Homer,  as  we  observe  it,  for  example,  in  his  description  of 
the  death  of  Achilles : — 


WHAT   WILL  BE  THE  END   THEREOF?  329 

The  grey  dawn  glimmered,  and  the  ebbing  tide 

Slipped  from  the  naked  sands  about  the  ships, 

And  drained  Scamander  of  its  full-fed  life. 

But  in  the  Grecian  Camp  was  life  and  stir, 

Neighing  of  full-fed  steeds,  and  clank  of  arms, 

And  trumpet-calls  and  marshalling  of  men ; 

For  that  this  day  the  Master  of  the  War, 

Pelides'  self,  should  take  the  field,  and  sweep 

The  Trojan  battle  from  the  plains  of  Troy. 

So  men,  unknowing,  spake ;  and  from  his  tents. 

With  godlike  step  and  godlike  in  his  face, 

Achilles  came.     And  all  about  his  limbs 

The  wondrous  armour  which  the  Fire-God  wrought. 

Helmet  and  cuirass,  cuisses,  and  the  shield 

Sevenfold,  and  shapely  greaves,  that  shot  their  light 

Down  on  the  naked  marble  of  his  feet. 

His  look  was  as  of  one  who  knew  not  care, 

Nor  memory  of  the  past,  nor  things  to  come ; 

Not  the  dead  comrade,  nor  the  fell  revenge. 

Nor  shame  of  slaughtered  warriors  at  the  pyre. 

Nor  lust  of  ravished  maid,  nor  sullen  strife. 

Nor  the  short  span,  and  swiftly  severed  thread, — 

But  only  present  triumph. 

To  the  front 
He  strode ;  and  shading  with  an  upraised  hand 
His  level  glance,  gazed  at  the  Trojan  lines, 
Which,  thrice  as  far  as  bowmen  shoot  the  bow, 
Were  clustering,  thick  as  ants  in  harvest-time 
Cluster  around  their  harried  nest,  and  brave 
With  weak  defence  the  ruin  that  impends. 
But  one  was  in  their  van,  who  seemed  in  shape. 
In  grace,  and  nimbleness,  and  fatal  gift 
Of  beauty,  like  the  shepherd-prince  who  lured 
The  love  of  Spartan  Helen  from  her  lord. 
No  man  was  near  him,  none  seemed  'ware  of  him  j 
Alone  he  stood,  unhelmed,  and  round  his  head 
The  rising  sun,  smiting  the  rising  mist. 
Broke  in  a  sudden  glory ;  and  behind, 
High  up,  the  towers  of  angry  Pallas  frowned. 
No  armour  had  he,  save  that  in  his  hand 
A  golden  bow  was  bended  to  the  full ; 
And  as  Achilles  turned,  with  curving  lip. 
Contemptuous,  to  his  men,  an  arrow  sang, 
22 


330  THE   PATHOLOGY   OF  WILL. 

And  cleft  the  middle  aii-,  and  dipped,,  and  plunged 
Full  on  the  naked  marble  of  his  foot. 
Through  high-arched  instep,  ankle,  and  the  strings 
That  bind  the  straining  heel,  it  sped,  and  nailed 
The  wolf-skin  sandal  to  the  crimson  sand. 
Slow  on  one  knee  he  sank,  his  strong,  right  hand 
Staymg  his  fall,  and  watched  with  steady  eye 
The  full  life  draining  from  the  wound,  and  spake, — 
'  Mother,  thy  word  was  true.     The  end  is  come.' 
.    Nor  ever  spake  again. 

Consider  again  the  fact  of  suicide,  wliicli  is  a  sort  of  con- 
vulsive climax  of  pessimism.  From  a  purely  psycliological 
point  of  view  it  must  be  acknowledged  the  most  momentous 
example  of  freewill  on  human  record.  Convinced  of  a  life 
after  death,  and  of  a  life  that  will  be  a  life  of  unspeakable 
joy  or  of  unspeakable  woe  according  to  the  deeds  done  in  the 
flesh,  assured  that  suicide  will  precipitate  him  into  an  abyss 
of  endless  suffering,  the  unhappy  person  nevertheless  reck- 
lessly perpetrates  it  when  his  misery  on  earth  is  greater 
than  that  which  he  believes  he  is  able  to  bear.  Against  it 
there  is  every  motive  that  can  influence  a  conscious  being,  so 
that  the  act  is,  qnd  consciousness,  the  most  wonderfully 
illogical  act  of  which  any  one  can  be  guilty :  either  a  stupen- 
dous example  of  freewill  or  a  reductio  ad  absurdum  of  the 
doctrine.  Manifestly  there  is  a  deeper  and  more  powerful 
motive  at  work  than  any  conscious  motives ;  for  certainly 
that  which  happens  in  nature  cannot  be  illogical  in  the  logic 
of  nature  ;  and  without  doubt  it  would  be  perceived  by  con- 
sciousness to  be  logical  enough  could  consciousness  only 
survive  to  justify  it.  An  instinct  deeper  and  truer  than  any 
conscious  belief  declares  the  certainty  of  relief.  The  motive 
is  irresistibly  impellent,  because  it  is  the  total  outcome  in 
consciousness  of  the  failure  of  vital  energies  and  of  the  there- 
from resulting  sufferings  of  the  individual  elements  of  the 
tissues.  When  these  energies  have  been  exhausted  gradually 
^y  the  decay  of  age,  the  individual  hopes  and  quietly  waits  for 
the  release  of  death  ;  when  they  are  deficient  naturally,  or  are 
prematurely  exhausted  either  by  sudden  and  overwhelming 
prostration  or  slowly  by  steadily  sapping  causes,  physical 


(/ 


/ 


■^TIAT   WILL  BE   THE  END   THEEEOF?  331 

or  moral,  lie  precipitates  violentlj  the  release  tliat  they  crave. 
For  the  conscious  result  is  an  utter  dreariness  of  feeling,  a 
loss  of  interest  in  and  hold  on  external  events,  a  repugnance 
to  the  vanity  of  hope,  a  supreme  life-weariness.  Those  who 
have  made  mental  pathology  a  study  know  well  that  there 
is  no  more  powerful  cause  of  individual  suicide  than  the  pre- 
mature loss  of  the  evolutional  energy,  mental  and  bodily.  If 
suicide  be  not  the  upshot,  there  is  perhaps  an  abandonment 
to  the  use  of  alcohol  or  opium  which,  stimulating  the  flagging 
energies,  creates  a  temporary  ideal,  or  to  chloral  or  similarly 
acting  drugs  that  produce  a  temporary  insensibility  :  a  false 
refuge,  since  they  inevitably  make  matters  worse  in  the  end. 
'Tis  a  way  of  making  Hell  by  a  mad  attempt  to  find  Heaven. 

Obviously  this  is  not  the  best  of  all  possible  worlds,  since 
men  have  conceived  a  better  in  the  shape  of  a  Paradise  that 
has  been  and  is  to  come ;  nor  is  it  the  worst  of  all  possible 
worlds,  since  they  have  conceived  a  worse  in  the  shape  of  a 
Hell.  Meanwhile  it  is  sure  to  get  either  better  or  worse. 
Whether  it  will  get  better,  and,  if  so,  for  how  long,  or  whether 
it  will  get  worse,  and,  if  so,  how  soon,  are  questions  that  it  is 
signal  presumption  on  our  part  to  imagine  we  can  answer. 
That  it  will  get  better  for  a  long  time  to  come,  but  worse  in 
the  end,  is  a  theory  that  seems  to  suit  well  with  the  explicit 
truths  of  human  thought  and  with  the  implicit  truths  of 
liuman  conduct;  for  mankind  is  as  optimistic  in  theory  as  it 
is  pessimistic  in  practice.  Visions  of  golden  ages,  of  extinc- 
tions of  wars  and  other  calamities,  of  reigns  of  righteousness 
and  universal  brotherhood,  and  the  like,  are  evolved  as 
excellent  ideals  to  inspire  and  guide  the  units  in  their  strug- 
gles ;  but  the  acts  of  practical  life  are  none  the  less  imbued 
with  the  implicit  certitude  that  the  respective  sums  of  vice 
and  virtue  will  not  change,  and  that  the  race  will  be  very 
much  what  it  has  been  until  its  doom  is  accomplished. 
What,  then,  shall  we  say  ?  That  it  is  well  to  proclaim  and 
extol  the  ideal,  as  M.  Eenan  does,  reserving  only  the  right 
to  laugh  quietly  in  his  sleeve  ? 

It  is  almost  literally  true  of  social  evolution  that  we  know 
not  what  a  day  may  bring  forth.  Even  if  civilisation  pro- 
gresses in  the   direction  of  softening  characters  and  abo- 


332  THE  PATHOLOGY  OF  WILL. 

lishing  wars,  it  does  not  follow  that  the  result  will  be  a 
certain  good ;  for  it  may  be  to  dry  up  the  sources  of  the 
virtues  and  to  enervate  mankind  morally.  Again,  if  the  pre-  % 
valence  of  ease,  luxury,  and  self-indulgence  be  so  great  in 
a  nation  as  to  threaten  its  speedy  decadence,  an  unforeseen 
reaction  may  occur  suddenly  and  issue  in  the  revival  of 
austerity  and  asceticism,  and  so  pessimism  give  place  to  ideal- 
ism ;  for  the  reformer  is  the  proper  product  of  evil  times.  / 
We  cannot  predict  that  in  time  to  come  some  new  develop-  / 
ment  of  feeling  may  not  take  place  which  shall  be  as  high 
above  moral  feeling  as  moral  feeling  is  high  above  the  most 
primitive  egoistic  passion,  and  of  a  nature  as  inconceivable 
to  us  as  moral  feeling  would  have  been  to  a  primitive  savage. 
Nor  can  we  predict  that  a  great  invention  may  not  be  made 
any  day,  which  shall  change  the  whole  face  of  the  earth  and 
modify  profoundly  men's  relations  to  it  and  to  one  another. 
Suppose  that  man  had  lived  at  a  time  when  the  simple  ele- 
ments had  not  yet  formed  their  more  complex  organic 
compounds,  could  he  have  foretold  in  the  least  from  the 
basis  of  the  then  existing  organic  substances  what  higher 
compounds  were  to  be  formed  in  the  future,  although  they 
were  on  the  brink  of  formation  ?  Assuredly  not ;  and  yet 
in  that  case  he  would  have  had  to  do  with  simple  elements 
and  comparatively  simple  operations  of  nature,  whereas  in 
the  social  evolution  of  the  race  we  have  to  do  with  the  most 
complex  elements  and  the  most  complex  operations  in  the 
world.  How  idle  and  presumptuous,  then,  the  pretence  to 
forecast  it !  What  account  would  a  Eoman  philosopher  of 
the  time  of  Augustus,  venturing  to  divine  the  future  of 
Europe,  have  taken  of  the  babe  that  *  all  meanly  wrapt  in  a 
rude  manger  lay '  in  a  small  town  of  a  remote  province  of  the 
empire  ;  and  what  sort  of  a  business  would  he  have  made  of 
his  predictions  ?  The  philosopher  of  to-day  who  can  tell 
us  what  happened  when  the  foundations  of  the  earth  were 
laid  and  the  morning  stars  sang  together  will  no  doubt  be 
ready  to  tell  us  exactly  what  will  happen  when  the  founda- 
tions of  the  earth  are  unlaid  and  the  morning  stars  shall 
cease  to  sing  together ;   those  who  have  not  his  confident 


WHAT  WILL  BE  THE  END  THEEEOF  ?  333 

insight  into  creations  and  uncreations  will  be  content  to 
hold  their  peace,  lest  they  should  speak  without  knowledge 
words  that  are  without  wisdom.  But  be  the  words  spoken 
the  words  of  folly  or  of  wisdom,  they  are  in  the  end  alike 
vanity.  *  All  that  which  is  past  is  as  a  Dream ;  and  he 
that  hopes  or  depends  upon  Time  coming,  dreams  waking.' 


WORKS  OF  HENRY  MADDSLEY,  M.  D. 

Fellow  of  the  Royal  College  of  Physicians ;  Professor  of  Medical 
Jurisprudence  in  University  College,  London. 


Body  and  Mind: 

An  Inquiry  into  their  Connectioa  and  Mutual  Influence,  specially  in  refer, 
ence  to  Mental  Disorders.     1  vol.,  12mo.     Cloth,  $1.50. 

PHYSIOLOGY  AND  PATHOLOGY  OF  MIND: 

Physiology  of  tl\e  Mind. 

New  edition.  1  vol.,  12nio.  Cloth,  |2.00.  Contents:  Chapter  I.  On  the 
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vous Centres;  Intellectorium  Commune. — VI.  The  Emotions. — VII.  Voli- 
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or  Effection. — IX.  Memory  and  Imagination. 

Patlxology  of  tl\e  Mind. 

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ity :  (A)  Etiological. — IV.  The  same  continued. — V.  The  Causation  and 
Prevention  of  Insanity :  (B)  Pathological. — VI.  The  Insanity  of  Early  Life. 
— VII.  The  Symptomatology  of  Insanity. — VIII.  The  same  continued. — 
IX.  Clinical  Groups  of  Mental  Disease. — X.  The  Morbid  Anatomy  of  Men- 
tal Derangement. — XL  The  Treatment  of  Mental  Disorders. 

I\esponsibility  iry  Mer\tal  Disease. 

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3  1158  00636  8376 


